Having a website is a critical component for business, but are there villains lurking in your website, preventing lead capturing or receiving an order? Occasionally, even the smoothest operating website may have glitches. Consistent maintenance and testing can help identify and alleviate these issues’ impact and chase away those Villains. We’ve put together an essential monthly checklist of tasks and tests that need to be run to keep a site running smoothly to maximize performance and sales. We recommend implementing this checklist immediately after the site goes live.
A maintenance plan that targets website security, speed, and SEO will enhance user experience. A positive user experience leaves customers satisfied with their website’s interaction and helps ensure the Website goals and objectives are met.
Here is our monthly website maintenance list for 2022:
- Website Audit
Monthly website maintenance begins with an SEO Audit. There are specific criteria to review during the audit. For example, website usability, page speed, technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Scan the code to ensure it meets the current standards. Also, test the responsiveness of design, confirm accessibility, and repair broken links. Check if elements such as RSS feeds, contact forms, internal search, checkout, and clickable buttons function correctly.
- Website Performance Analysis
Analyzing various aspects concerned with your website performance is a must. Freely available tools like Google Analytics can help to monitor traffic to a Website. Monitor KPI’s like website visitors, page views, bounce rates, submitted orders, and track the submission of forms.
Regularly monitor the metrics and compare them to the previous month’s performance. The reports will help identify any potential problems. Set up settings to receive email alerts in case a trend changes. High bounce rates may indicate a problem with the content or a page. Monthly website maintenance will help determine if the website is receiving a lot of spam traffic. A decline in orders, events, goals, and conversion rates may also point to a problem requiring resolution.
- Monitor Website Security
It is essential to monitor website security features to prevent falling prey to cyber-attacks. Establish healthy websites, clean up spam traffic, and monitor known threats. These measures will ensure that your visitors can continue having a good user experience. Make sure to limit access and remove any past employees from accessing website data.
Ideally, a website should have an SSL certificate and a security plugin, covering the significant threats, including brute force, DDoS, comment spam, and malware threats. It is crucial to remove malware and restore the site following an attack. The sooner this is done, the better.
- Test Forms on the website
Most websites have forms for collecting leads, email addresses, and other information. Test forms to maintain positive user experience. Next, test the internal processes for responding to the inquiries left on the forms. The goal is to reduce the time it takes to respond to an inquiry and ensure the appropriate responses.
It is not enough to have an auto-email response. Suppose a client asks for someone to call him or her back, follow through with the inquiry. Failure to respond to customer inquiries greatly diminishes the user experience.
I recently submitted an inquiry on a service provider’s website, asking for someone to contact me through my own frustrating experience. Later, I received an auto-response email informing me that my inquiry went through, but no one ever contacted me. I completed another request with the same result. I attempted to call, but the phone number was not easy to find. The business has lost a potential customer! Making sure to test the front-end user experience AND processes for handling those inquiries will ensure a positive user experience and prevent potential lost revenue.
- Test the Order Process
This step is essential, especially for those with e-commerce websites. Carrying out a simple purchase test will help discover problems and give customers a more straightforward order process. Go to the landings page, navigate to a product, add it to the shopping cart, and check out as a customer would.
- Test Website Speed
One of the aspects that contribute to a positive user experience is the speed of the website. Thus, a fast-running speed allows visitors to view and navigate from page to page seamlessly. Pages with a lengthy load time may have a higher bounce rate, which means visitors will leave pages after a short time. The less the time they spend on the site, the less the customers’ conversions.
- Backup and Restore
The data and content on websites are too valuable to lose. Regularly backup the database and files. But don’t stop there. Ensure that the backups run correctly and can help to recover the website. Also, monthly backups need to be part of website maintenance regardless of the size. Generate a backup and store it in the cloud where it can be retrieved to restore the website.
- Update Software
Without regular software updates, a website is prone to hacking incidents. It is much easier for hackers to figure out how to break into a site with outdated software. Make sure that core, themes, and plugins are all up to date. Not only will this prevent possible infections, but the website will also continue to run smoothly.
- Update content
Since it’s at the core, content should always be up to date. If the content is stale, no one would want to give your pages a second look. Write blog posts, run new promotions, offer new products, or remove graphics from the past. Add content daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. Whatever the frequency, refresh the content regularly to suit your business. Most importantly, maintain consistency.
I like to use the analogy of going into a brick and mortar store. Let’s suppose you have a favorite shoe store. If each time you walk into that store, they have the same exact shoes. How many more times do you think you will visit the store? If you are anything like me, it’s likely once I figure this out, I will not be going back.
- Editing the Website
Group the website maintenance tasks into smaller, superficial, changes, and severe technical issues. Then, put the smaller issues into one bundle to carry out once every month. That will leave time to address the more serious technical problems. For example, treat content and tag editing more seriously. Since these issues affect SEO, it should take substantially longer to address them.