The Importance of Regular Website Maintenance

The most crucial requirement to promote organic traffic and strengthen your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to rank better in the search results is to consistently check whether your website is running smoothly. Maintaining the health of your website by regular investigation for any issues in addition to further modification will ensure your site is kept up to date and relevant to search engine bots and your audience.

A healthy and functioning website is essential for any online business to retain its audience and improve on SEO ranking factors. For this reason, regular monitoring is mandatory to keep your business running without a hitch and in the long run, leaves a positive impact on your revenue. Regardless of the content management system (CMS) you use, it is important to have a long-term site maintenance plan along with regular security updates. In this article, we’ll be delving into the reasons why you should consider regular site maintenance.

Maintains Strong SEO 

The main objective of starting a business is to make a profit from sales, but that can only happen if it attracts customers, leads, or an audience. SEO is thus necessary for any online business as it drives up organic traffic and retains your position in search results. As Google prioritizes relevancy and the most recent information, there are chances a website might get de-indexed if it hasn’t been updated in a while or is infected by malware.

As a healthy SEO strategy, regularly update your content with relevant news, articles, and keywords to rank better in search results. However, a proper SEO strategy is incomplete without regular website maintenance which can be done by trained experts that can take various aspects of the website into account. Though it may seem unimportant and easily put off to a later date, it does play a larger role thank you think in the branding and growth of your business.

Enhanced Security Measures

If your website handles storing any type of customer information, you must focus on implementing the highest possible security measures on your website. For CMS platforms like WordPress or Wix, it is as simple as installing regular software updates and security patches to keep your site malware-free. Remember that an outdated website is often a prime target for hackers and is considered to be significantly more vulnerable compared to well-maintained sites.

Longer Customer Engagement

Your website is the most essential part of your online business. Without a proper running website, you will face unnecessary challenges and pitfalls that can affect your revenue. When your website is up to date and active, it can be a profitable asset and valuable support to your business.

If your website lacks in delivering relevant content to your target audience, chances are they will quickly lose interest in your site and you will lose potential customers. You should aim to provide valuable content to retain customer engagement and drive more traffic to your website. However, regular maintenance not only deals with updating content and providing better security but also increasing the page’s loading speed which can help reduce your site’s bounce rate.

A Quick Checklist to Assess Your Website’s Health

While there may seem like countless things to keep track of when ensuring your website runs smoothly, take note that not everything has to be accomplished at a single time. Some items only require weekly monitoring, while others monthly and even yearly, to ensure the overall health of the website. Take a step back and focus on one objective at a time.

To reap the full benefits of a well-maintained website, you may also want to consider learning about responsive web design or elements of a successful web design from our earlier articles. In the meantime, we have compiled a list of things for you to monitor on your website as a rough guide to set you on the right track for regular website maintenance.

Things to monitor weekly: 

  • Check if all pages are loading without error.
  • Update plugins and website software.
  • Remove spam comments from your pages and posts.
  • Store a previous version of your website before running a weekly backup.
  • Check if the forms on your website are working properly.
  • Check for any 404 pages and fix or redirect them, if any.
  • Identify any broken links to be fixed.

Things to monitor monthly:

  • Check the loading speed of your website.
  • Analyse and evaluate website statistics.
  • Review security scans.

Things to monitor annually:

  • Any references to the current year need to be updated.
  • Check for content quality, spelling, typos, and relevance on each article.
  • Make sure your website's domain name is up to date.
  • Consider if you need to change your website's architecture.
  • Examine all your best-performing blog posts to see if they can be replaced with new content.

Conclusion

Regular site maintenance may seem like a daunting and time-consuming task, but it is definitely something you should pay attention to from the get-go for the growth of your business. Do this, and you’ll be seeing an increase in traffic to your website, strengthening your overall SEO strategy, improved security, as well as a better image of your brand.

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Eliza K. from Swift DevLabs

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