The internet and websites are constantly changing, which makes it even more important to keep yourself updated with recent changes or trends. You may think about the reasons behind the downfall of your site while your competitors are doing great. The core factor that plays a crucial role in this is website maintenance. Larger enterprises take care of their sites and keep updating them quite often. It means they regularly update the website information to eliminate broken links or other website issues.
Therefore, to stay in the competition and achieve your business goals, you must be on top of website maintenance. You should know what a website maintenance plan includes and what things are required to avoid your site falling.
In this article, we will explain everything there is about website maintenance and why it is important for your brand or business.
What is a Website Maintenance Plan?
Simply put, a website maintenance plan is a list of tasks to maintain or manage the website, aiming to keep it updated and secured.
The maintenance plan may involve cleanup, backup, and archival tasks on a daily, weekly and annual basis. These tasks are very important to keep the websites clean and updated, or they may be lost without any trace. Let's explain this with a detailed example. You own a car you love the most, and you often check the tires, body, brakes, and other spare parts to see if any maintenance is required. You want your car to drive smoothly and perfectly for you, right?
The same is the case with website maintenance. Just like the car's oil change and thorough engine inspection, websites also need regular maintenance of security, content, and other important areas. You may need the best and most reliable website maintenance company in Dubai to trust your website's health and security.
The work is not done by just creating the whole website. It needs to grow with time, and maintenance plays a pivotal role. Unfortunately, most websites have been there for many years, and they still wonder why it is not working as expected. It is because they still need to update the website.
Why is Website Maintenance Essential?
Everybody knows the importance of having a website for business. But you must understand that only a website is never enough. It regularly needs to be maintained and updated to run at its full capacity and potential to help you achieve goals.
Just like anything else, websites also need maintenance regularly to operate perfectly. A well-maintained website always has excellent security, increased organic traffic, and many other things.
Following are a few prominent reasons why it is important to maintain the website.
1. Improves Security
For websites, security is always the top concern. The security of your website is more important, especially when you use CMS such as WordPress. You want your data to be secured, and your website must have the ability to stand against cyber-attacks. Therefore, websites must be maintained in terms of security. With regular maintenance, your website will get enhanced security.
2. Increases Website Traffic
The regular content update makes your website more into the searches. Your website content must be according to the latest SEO ranking factors and search engine algorithms to increase organic traffic. It will be possible when you maintain your website with new content that is more relatable to readers. The content must focus on the target audience and relevant keywords with valuable information. So, the updated content will get you, new visitors.
3. Enhances User Experience
A well-maintained website with updated shareable content such as trending blogs, galleries, and upcoming events gives users an idea about your business. Website maintenance is important to engage with your visitors, and they most likely take actions such as signing up for a membership or buying your services or products. Your brand voice will reach louder and stronger to potential clients or customers.
Top 13 Important Tasks to Include in a Website Maintenance Plan
As mentioned earlier, website maintenance is a set of tasks covering different aspects of web design, development and optimization. It includes everything that is a must to run a successful website at its ultimate potential.
Let's have a look at some examples of critical tasks that you should include in a website maintenance plan.
1. Website Backup:
Each website tends to change with time and the trends that are followed globally. However, you need to have your website backup in dire situations. The maintenance of the website also involves a backup that allows you to restore your data at any time you want.
The sites with no data recovery plan tend to fall and the data lost, resulting in the devaluation of the website. To resolve such problems, you must maintain your website to have a backup of your website. Most websites follow standard backup that saves the files on the same server, which increases the potential risk if the server gets hacked. You do not want unwanted people to access your data.
Therefore, a regularly scheduled backup is the best solution to avoid such risk. Website maintenance allows fast and easy restoration.
2. Content Changes and Updates:
A website needs to consistently update the content to make it relevant for the visitors. Therefore, you must check for new updates and incorporate them into your site content. If you update the content, there is a much greater chance that you will retain your traffic.
With website maintenance, you will get a chance to improve your content and work on all factors that can improve your content quality. Brands need to change the content and add more relevant blogs and information about recent updates or trends.
3. Design Changes and Optimization:
Website design is also a crucial factor that plays a significant role in improving your branding and marketing. People like to spend time on pages that are attractive in looks and have vibrant colors. Therefore, your website design must also change after some time to entice your visitors.
In website maintenance plans, design changes and optimization have a special place. So, whenever you make up your mind to update your website, focus on design and templates. It will give your website a fresh look.
4. Website Speed Optimization:
People and even Google search engines prefer websites with fast loading speeds. In fact, it is the most important thing for users because they don't spend time on sites that take longer to load. By prioritizing the user experience, you can attract more traffic.
With website maintenance, you can check and update your site with tools that can help you optimize speed. As a result, your website becomes faster and shows quick results that ultimately increase your ranking. Speed monitoring is also included in the website maintenance plan. Optimizing the website loading speed can help you increase sales and rank your site higher, as expected.
5. Links Check and Broken Links Fixing:
A website with more content pages is more likely to experience broken links. It affects the health of websites. Some common link breaks happen because of affiliate linking, such as Amazon and social media. The links can break and disappear from your site. WordPress provides a broken link check with easy installation, allowing you to check link breaks daily and fix all links.
Your audience would never like broken links. It is considered poor if a website has broken internal and external links. Moreover, it also affects search engines. Do not wait to check the broken links; get help and start your website maintenance right away.
6. Theme/ Plugin Updates and Compatibility:
Websites also run specific software and plugins that needs regular maintenance to provide efficient services. New updates of such plugins must be installed properly for stability, security, and getting new features for your website.
When you start a website maintenance plan, your site software is updated like our smartphones.
With regular software updates, your websites will stay updated, and there will be fewer risks in terms of your site’s security. Make sure your site has excellent health before you start software updates. Otherwise, it can result in a broken website. Moreover, create a backup before starting the update.
7. Browser Compatibility and Optimization:
The compatibility of the website with the browser is important. Simply put, browser compatibility is that the website can easily be translated through a specific browser. The goal is to make it accessible and functional for users. You may experience that some sites work efficiently in one browser but face issues while you search on other browsers.
A website is considered the best if it is compatible across multiple browsers. If there is a compatibility issue, your audience won't like it, and it gives a bad impression of your site. Our experienced website maintenance company in Dubai can solve such issues with regular maintenance of your website.
8. Website Responsiveness / Mobile-Friendliness:
The majority of people use mobile phones to access the internet quite often. Therefore, your website needs to be mobile-friendly with efficient responsiveness. Some sites work perfectly on PCs and laptops, but when it comes to mobile phones, they are not efficient enough to load web pages quickly.
You can check for responsiveness during website maintenance and make it work better. It enhances the user experience.
9. SEO Optimization
SEO is the most important factor for your site's ranking on search engines. Your website ranking depends on the related and top keywords. Most sites do not make it to the top results because of poor SEO optimization of meta tags, headings, alt-tags, and the use of keywords in the content.
You can stay ahead of your competitors in terms of ranking with a proper website maintenance plan. It allows you to optimize your content, on-page elements, website speed, internal link structure, and other technical SEO elements.
10. Website Security and Vulnerability Check:
Most sites worked with open-source CMS such as WordPress. Although such CMS is open source, there are some drawbacks as well. WordPress or a similar kind of CMS is regularly updated, and there are consistent releases. If your website is not updated with the latest version, you get exposed, and hackers can attack.
With the right and reliable website maintenance, your website will be updated and secured.
11. User Experience Optimization
User is everything, and therefore, you need to make their experience more convenient and hassle-free. If your website is slow, broken, poorly designed, and unstable, your visitors will never recommend you. As a result, you will lose your reputation and revenue.
If you want your site to generate revenue and increase your sales, you need to make things easier for your visitors. It will be possible with the right and effective maintenance plan.
12. Domain and Hosting Check (hosting, SSL certificates, etc.)
Checking domain names and hosting is important. It can happen that you forget to renew your domain name, and it falls prey to some hackers. It is rare, but you must be careful. Moreover, you should check the expiration of the SSL certificate, domain name, hosting services, and billing of your annual packages and plugins or themes you are using for your site.
With regular website maintenance, you can easily keep track of these things and update them on time.
13. Website Outages Monitoring (such as unplanned outages or hacking)
Websites must work well if you want to keep your business on the right track. Therefore, you constantly need to monitor your site and its activities.
In website maintenance, you can monitor the site's performance, functions, and availability. You can also opt for automated testing to pick and fix the bugs in your site. However, you can set the schedule of testing at timely intervals.
Essential Web Maintenance Activities to Perform
a) Daily Website Maintenance Activities:
In daily website maintenance, the activities that are prioritized include the visual inspection of the site, resolving the requests received in the contact form, backup of the website, and reviewing the uptime logs. These are the maintenance tasks that need to be performed daily.
b) Weekly Website Maintenance Activities
If you opt for weekly website maintenance, you should look for activities such as checking for 404 errors, updating the website software and core plugins, reviewing the broken links, and fixing them.
c) Monthly Website Maintenance Activities:
Your monthly website maintenance should perform activities such as testing the loading speed and site's performance, reviewing and fixing security issues, creating analysis and stats, checking search visibility, and backup verification.
d) Quarterly Website Maintenance Activities
The main activities included in the quarterly maintenance plan are the website analysis, graphic updates, meta tags, and descriptions, checking for mobile responsiveness, smooth running of forms and popups, checking the site's health, and conducting an audit of the website and its SEO.
e) Yearly Website Maintenance Activities
The yearly website maintenance is relatively thorough as it covers reviewing the web strategy, renewing the domain, updating web design, reviewing each web page, updating the top-performing blogs, auditing the plugins, and updating SSL and copyrights.
Keep Your Site Green with Our Website Maintenance Plan!
At SpiralClick, you will get advanced, quality, and affordable website maintenance plans with experts. We will monitor and update your site to ensure the best user experience. Once we establish a maintenance plan for your website, you can customize the package according to your needs. We provide all the activities mentioned above.
Moreover, we guide you on making your website more visible to your potential and targeted audience using the right strategies. Get in touch with us and check out our website maintenance plans.
Frequently Asked Questions:
a) What is a website maintenance plan?
A website maintenance plan is the list of important activities that ensure your website is managed properly and provides the best services and experience to the potential audience with updated and secured information.
b) What does website maintenance include?
The website maintenance plan includes the following tasks:
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Website backup
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Content changes and updates
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Design changes and optimization
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Software updates
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Browser compatibility
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Website responsiveness / mobile-friendliness
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User experience optimization
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Domain and hosting check
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Website outages monitoring
c) Why do you need a website maintenance plan?
Each website needs a reliable and effective web maintenance plan because it keeps it protected by improving security, boosting sales by increasing website traffic, and enhancing the user experience quite effectively.
d) What is the monthly website maintenance plan?
The monthly website maintenance plan covers activities such as testing the loading speed and the site's performance, creating analysis and stats, reviewing and fixing security issues, checking search visibility, and verifying the backups.
e) Is a website maintenance plan worth investing in?
Yes, buying a website maintenance package is worth investing in because it can help you generate massive revenue. Moreover, your brand will get noticed by more potential audiences.
