Website maintenance is a routine and necessary task of running a website to keep it updated and relevant and to fix any technical glitches. It is something that you should not neglect if you want your website business to be successful. However, there are too many things on your checklists, so how do you know what really needs your attention? In the following parts, we will show you what important tasks need completing regularly within a website maintenance checklist in order to avoid technical glitches.

What is Website Maintenance?

A website maintenance checklist, as the name suggests, provides a list of tasks or a sequence of steps that ensures optimization and smooth working order of the website. A proper website maintenance schedule helps in preventing unforeseen technical glitches and breaking news which can cause huge financial losses to your business. In fact, it also helps in rectifying the glitches quickly without wasting much time.

So, why is website maintenance necessary?

The answer to this question lies in the fact that over a period of time, there are several factors that can potentially affect the overall performance of your website. Sometimes it may lead to the suspension of your website or you might be forced to upgrade to a new version of an existing software because old versions are no longer supported by their developers. That’s where regular updates play a vital role as they keep your site protected against security threats and also help in maintaining its speed and performance. It is always better to follow proactive measures instead of reactive ones as they allow you to save time and resources along with preventing any future problems that may arise. It is worth mentioning that website maintenance is not a one-off task and should be performed on a regular basis. Keeping that in mind, we’ve put together this website maintenance checklist to help you prevent any technical glitches and take your site run smoothly:

  1. Check Your Website Speed

Having a slow loading speed can cause problems for both visitors and search engine listings because Google also uses site speed as one of the factors in its ranking system. If your site takes more than 10 seconds to load or if there’s a page that takes longer than three seconds to open, then it may have a negative impact on the rankings. Whenever there is any update or modifications made to your site, you need to check whether it has affected its speed. If it did slow down, then this needs the immediate attention of the developer since people generally shy away from visiting sites that load slowly. Optimizing a site’s speed can be done by checking plugins and themes used in the development process, etc. Most website maintenance companies go over these aspects with care beforehand - so this step should not give you much trouble. Once you've confirmed that everything looks good from an SEO standpoint, it's time to look at broken links (provided you're not running an e-commerce store). Broken links will lead visitors away from your site and decrease user experience.

  1. Renew Website Domain Name and SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate ensures the security of information sent over the Internet, including any credit card or personal details submitted through forms on websites. Despite its importance, many website owners typically pay less attention to the certificate than they do to their actual site. However, if you’re running an e-commerce site, having this element of your site fail can result in a loss of potential sales and damage your brand reputation. Most website maintenance companies take care of the renewal process, but you will need to update your contact details and let them know when it is due for renewal. If you fail to do so in time, then your site could go offline which would cause considerable loss of business. It’s important that you set up email reminders before the expiry date comes within a 1-month window period.

  1. Remove Duplicate Content

Google updates its algorithm all the time so it’s important to ensure that you have a proper sitemap and robots.txt files in place because this help the web crawlers understand which pages on your website should be considered as unique content. If two or more pages have similar or duplicate content, then Google may end up serving them both and cause duplicates. Even though you can use plugins such as Yoast SEO for WordPress which helps prevent this from happening, it is still better to manually check if any duplicate content exists. This can be done by using a plugin like ‘WordFence Security’ which detects all duplicate content on your site and allows you to remove it manually or delete it permanently. By removing the duplicated content, you are making sure that Google knows that there is only ONE original piece of content and your site is not violating any digital laws.

  1. Check For SEO & Broken Links

You can use a plugin like ‘W3 Total Cache’ which audits all of your pages and detects broken links, low page speed, etc allowing you to resolve them immediately. You should also look at your website SERP using a tool such as Google Search Console to get an idea of how well it is doing in the search engine rankings. Improve these areas of your website with proper optimization by applying some simple website checks listed out above to avoid unnecessary technical glitches.

  1. Optimize The Site’s Database

The next thing that you should do is to optimize your website database. Most sites store meta tags and keywords inside their databases, this means that for every page on your site it will take longer to load because the search engine bots will have to look through multiple documents. The more documents there are in your site’s database the slower it will be. You can read about how to optimize the site’s sqlite3 here. Check out how much space your website’s database takes right now by logging into cPanel and go under the ‘MySQL Databases’ tab. Now select all your databases and click the ‘Compact’ button to force MySQL to optimize all of your databases. This process does take some time, but it is necessary to keep your site running smoothly. This means that you need to clean up the mess that may have been created over time due to or repetitive tasks. For example: if you have a blog post with the same title, in the database it will be seen as separate information. When editing or reusing that old content with different updates, look close to ensure you’re not creating duplicate content and avoid technical errors when publishing this older article. It's very important that everything is set in place to ensure efficient searching and browsing.

  1. Optimize Your Images

Although optimizing images may not give you a boost in search engine rankings, if done incorrectly then it could result in lower-ranking positions or even worse - de-indexation of all or part of your site. This happens when bots crawl an image being referenced from an HTML file and it finds the same image referenced from an external resource. This is commonly done by spammers who just upload a bunch of images and put them on their HTML pages without actually including them in their site’s content   Conclusion Website Maintenance is more than just re-installing software, updating Twitter accounts, and uploading press releases to WordPress directories it involves following a defined checklist that will help you safeguard your website against technical glitches that have the potential to cause data loss or downtime on your site. Follow these 6 easy steps before making any changes on your website - this way you can be sure of avoiding major issues when planning updates. If you don't have time to complete all six tasks, at least follow 'Step 1' and 'Step 2'. Also, make sure to check out our completely free Website Maintenance Planner for more details on these steps. Are you looking for a web design company with the experience and know-how to grow your online presence? Pixel Street- Web Design Company can help! We've done it before, why not get in touch now. Reach out today - we are waiting on YOU :)