Website Maintenance Checklist
At Internet Solutions For Less, we have come up with a basic website maintenance checklist to help you ensure your website is always hack proof, search engine friendly and most importantly end user friendly for not only computers, but more importantly mobile devices which will be at least half of your site traffic. Below is our website maintenance checklist:
Weekly Website Maintenance Checklist To do’s:
1. Login to your WordPress admin panel to ensure the current version of WordPress is up to date, all plugins have the newest version installed. Pay attention for prompts on the WordPress dashboard for any other maintenance messages.
2. If your site content changes or is at all modified make sure you run a backup of the site and database.
3. Write one blog post or put time into new content development for you website, fresh content is something that not only keeps your site relevant, but search engines like sites with fresh content.
Quarterly Website Maintenance Checklist To do’s:
1. Backup, backup, backup. If you do not have the time to run backups weekly or if your content does not change often, you should definately at least run a backup of your site and database quarterly.
2. Page Speed. Check your website speed with GTmatrix, if your website is slower or receives a lower than average grade, then consider looking to install a plugin the can speed the site up.
3. Test. Fill out your website inquiry forms to ensure they are functional and test your site on a mobile device to ensure ease of navigation.
4. Software/Plug-in Updates. If your website is using any CMS, scripts or plug-ins, then make sure they are fully updated.
5. Check for broken links. There are muliple site that will scan your site for free.
Resolve/remove any broken links or dead links.
6. Review. Images/Content in your site must be reviewed to ensure all is spell checked and grammatically correct. Review content (text-HTML ratio, grammar, plagiarism, readability), image (alte tags, names) and Meta tags.
7. HTTPs Encryption. If you have a SSL certificate installed then make sure the encrypted lock appears on all pages of your site.
8. Search Engine Optimization. Check Google Webmaster tools for website alerts/errors, search improvement suggestions, mobile compatability, mobile responsiveness, HTML code/W3c Validation and search engine index.
9. Analytics. Monitor and review your website traffic with Google Analytics and take notice on average time spent on this sairte, if it is less than 2 minutes you will need to come up with a staregy to prvide more content and value within your site.
Yearly Website Maintenance Checklist To do’s:
1. Test your website on new web browsers, Web browsers are updated frequently and sometimes the updates may affect how your website will display. To make sure that your website is on different devices.
2. Check to see when your domain name expires and ensure it is renewed ahead of time. When you renew the domain, renew for at least three years as Google looks at how long your domain is renewed for and possibly penalizes sites that are only renewed one year at a time as that may be a sign of a business that does not plan on being around long.
3. Renew SSL to ensure your pages are encrypted and safe to browse.
Website maintenance is very important to keep your site safe and easy to use for the end user, keep up on your maintenance tasks and continue to add new content to your site in order to keep it fresh. To learn more about our website maintenance services, click here or contact us today for a free consultation.