There’s no better feeling than going live with a brand-new website. After weeks of planning, designing, optimizing, developing, and copywriting, a newly live website can feel like crossing the finish line of a long race. But in reality, this is where the real work begins. A website is a living, breathing marketing platform that requires consistent monitoring and maintenance. In order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings, read through our essential website maintenance checklist.
Weekly
- Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
- Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
- Make updates to website software and plugins
- Check that all of your forms are running properly
- Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
- Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
- Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
Monthly
- Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
- Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
- Analyze website statistics from the previous month and provide detailed report
- Write one blog post to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic
Quarterly
- Review your website design and structure for areas improvement
- Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated
- Check graphics and images for applicable updates
- Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to ensure they are as effective as possible
- Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action
- Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly
- Export and save website to an external server
Yearly
- Update any reference to the current year
- Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
- Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
- Ensure that your website domain name is renewed
- Consider whether a website design update is due
- Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content
Yes, it’s a lot – but establishing a long-term website maintenance plan is extremely important. Not only because your website is the most universally-accessible marketing tool for your customers to find and learn about your business, but also to keep your site secure. Too often, lack of maintenance results in a website being hacked or infected with malware. Smaller scale problems can also arise from failing to or even waiting too long to make site updates. Utilizing this checklist will help you avoid potential breaks, save you time and money, and increase the security of your site. If ongoing website maintenance seems too overwhelming to handle on your own, contact our digital marketing team for help in providing a safe and secure environment for your visitors.
A natural-born leader who founded Tulip Tree Marketing with the intention of providing custom solutions to business leaders with unmatched experience, creativity, and passion. Her innate ability to maintain a fast-paced environment brewing with innovation and the highest of standards is one of the many reasons her team is considered the best talent in the industry.