Every modern business needs to have a professional website.
The days when old-fashioned business owners could continue to rely on word-of-mouth and print advertising are over. Today’s world is highly digitized, and successful companies embrace that fact by creating and maintaining high-quality websites.
Initial Website Creation
When designing your website, keep the company’s brand in mind.
The best way to wind up with a site that reflects the brand and wows visitors is to work with an industry professional, but that doesn’t mean business owners should expect to have no say in a site’s creation.
Spend some time brainstorming before each consultation and work directly with the web designer to address every potential issue prior to launch.
When to Perform Website Maintenance
There are some website maintenance tasks that must be performed often to keep the site functioning at peak levels, and others that can be addressed on a quarterly or even a yearly basis.
Business owners can tackle some of these basic maintenance tasks themselves, although others require the help of an experienced professional.
Weekly Maintenance
Business owners should check their websites each week and perform basic maintenance to ensure that every page is functioning properly. A good weekly website maintenance checklist will include:
- Checking each page for loading errors.
- Running a backup and storing a previous version of the site.
- Updating software and plugins.
- Checking all of the forms.
- Removing spam comments from posts.
- Checking for broken links.
- Looking for 404 errors.
- Writing one or more blog posts.
Most of these tasks are easily performed even by those who don’t have extensive knowledge of how websites work. Of course, any issues that come up during these weekly checks need to be brought to the attention of a qualified web designer.
Monthly Maintenance
While weekly website checks such as those described above help to ensure that everything is running well on a day-to-day basis, monthly maintenance focuses on the future.
Web designers and SEO experts will have enough information to begin analyzing engagement rates and other key metrics, which will allow them to understand what areas of the site are most in need of improvement.
Most monthly maintenance tasks are best left to professionals.
However, business owners should try to stay in the loop and ask about key monthly maintenance tasks such as the results of data analyses, security scans, and load speed tests. Now is also the time to check the company’s blog and find any articles that could benefit from an update.
Quarterly Maintenance
Quarterly website maintenance involves more intensive checks and updates.
Take some time each quarter to look for areas of the website design and structure that could use improvement.
Review the digital advertising campaigns associated with the site, test everything on different browsers and devices, and check all of the graphics, images, and forms to make sure they don’t need to be updated.
Now is also a good time to A/B test calls to action, forms, pop-ups, and other interactive features.
Business owners may also want to review workloads for efficiency. There may be aspects of the site that directly influence their companies’ operations that could be automated for increased efficiency.
Know When to Hire a Pro
While it’s fine for business owners to perform basic weekly checks and write the occasional blog post for later review, they should leave most website maintenance tasks to the pros.
Only a seasoned expert will be able to identify and resolve technical problems, optimize new content, and make sure everything stays up-to-date.