What is Website Maintenance – Why is it Important?

Having a webpage is no longer enough – Time to Pay attention to Website Maintenance

With the advancement of technologies and the digitization of business, we have to keep our websites in good condition, optimize them and move them forward as we grow as a business. Your website must be one of the key points of your online strategy, especially if it is a corporate page. After all, everything goes from how you present yourself and your business digitally. This presentation you want to be clean, clear and attractive. That has no errors or any door that leads nowhere. For that, it is important to have good website maintenance.

Website maintenance is a factor as important as the design or the creation of a website itself. And it allows your online page to achieve the objectives for which you originally created it. In short, website maintenance is the process that takes care of and maintains your website in good condition. Surely you would like everyone who visited your website to get a good impression. But surely you have also found yourself, as an Internet user, with many websites with broken links or pages that did not work.

Tasks of a good website maintenance

• Planning your virtual space
• Correct application operation
• Periodic Content Management
• Application and content update
• Graphic design of banners
• SEO Positioning
• Trencats link repair
• Fix miscellaneous errors

The website is the visible face of a company on the internet. More and more buyers prefer to use this route to buy a product or service.

In that sense, Guru, an expert company in the digitalization of SMEs, provides 5 keys to have an optimal, successful and effective website.

1. Domain name: It is very important because it gives identity to the website. It must be easy to remember and be related to the business or brand. This will help improve search engine positioning.
2. Content quality and site design: It is essential that the information is clear and organized so that the user can get what they are looking for: easy and fast. There must be a visual hierarchy between the content to promote clarity, understanding, and interaction. Currently, images, videos, contact forms (leads), geo-referencing tools and access to different social networks are usually used as basic elements.
3. Constant update: It is important to have updated content (regarding your company, products, services, and news) that meets the needs of users who visit your website, strengthen your credibility and motivate your contact.
4. Adaptation to mobile formats: When making a web page or updating the existing one, it is necessary to prioritize the mobile optimization of all sections, so that users can view the page without losing quality and functionality from any device.
5. Organic positioning in search engines: This is achieved with the permanent optimization of the programming of the page so that it is positioned in the first search engine results and acquire more customers.
6. Update plugins: One of the most basic tasks for maintaining a WordPress website is the update of the plugins. These are requiring updates from time to time that you must be doing so that they are not obsolete. Therefore, you should always have all the plugins of your website up to date to avoid possible falls, incompatibilities, and even for the security of the website.
7. Template update: Very related to the previous point is the update of the template that you use on your website. Our advice is that you always have the latest version to be protected from possible threats and also to have its most recent features.
8. Cache memory: Another task for the correct website maintenance of a web in WordPress is the management of the cache memory. The cache is a type of quick access memory that is stored in a folder of your server so that, when the web is loaded, the user will see the web stored in that memory. Its objective is to improve the loading speed of WordPress and reduce the consumption of resources made by a website when loading.
9. Database: Another task for maintaining a WordPress website is the cleaning and optimization of your database. With the passage of time, as a website grows, the database automatically stores all types of information and grows larger.

   

   For example, when you review and update a post that you had already published, WordPress stores each of the reviews in the web database. So, if you have reviewed, for example, a post three times, in the database there will be three different versions of it (and you have two leftovers). Therefore, you must clean the database from time to time (once a week, for example).

10. 10 Redirects: Directly related to 404 errors are redirected, especially if a website already has time and you have modified old posts, pages or products. If that is your case, you must be very careful so that the modified URLs redirect correctly to the new ones which is an important part of website maintenance.

So, If you do not have a web analytics system included in your site, it is time for you to integrate it.

I use Google Analytics to know what behavior users have on my website and what contents are the most successful, in this way I perform analytics to increase the following point:

• Check your income

  If you have a blog, you are still interested in monetizing it and getting a bonus (even if it is small) through advertising, referrals, or other systems. It is important to see where the market is moving and adapt in time, which is why we recommend you review your income, see if they increase or decrease and adapt your strategy to maximize them whenever possible.

• Take care of spam

  Although many times we have read that if spam comes to your blog is that something you are doing wrong, the reality is that any blog can get those unwanted comments. You can protect your blog in many ways, although we recommend you either through captchas or with anti-spam filters will help in website maintenance.

  

• Check your means of publication

  If you have a blog and you only have as a means of publishing your web page, something you are doing wrong. We live in a world of social networks, email, RSS. Check that your content syndication (RSS) works correctly periodically and that the feeds of your social networks publish it correctly. It is not the same to go out into the world only from a web page than to do it from 4 social networks and email. Check that they always work correctly for better website maintenance.

• Website Maintenance Frequency

  We cannot tell you how often you should perform these actions, but it will depend on the use you make of your blog, how much you publish and modify the site.

• Check your plugins

  Were you new to WordPress, have you changed your template recently and installed a thousand different plugins to add different things to your website? Surely many of them are completely unnecessary and can be deactivated or, better yet, removed from your site for better website maintenance.

  We suggest that you do not keep more than 10-15 active plugins in your WordPress, as we said in the previous point, the plugins are not always well programmed and can hinder your site.

• Optimize your images

  In website maintenance, it is very good and it is highly recommended to include images in the entries to energize the content (let’s not forget that an image is worth a thousand words), but do not forget that normal screens have a maximum resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels, it is not necessary Upload photos taken with your SLR camera; those that are 5000 pixels wide by not knowing how many high.

Think about your template, calculate the resolution that best suits it and enter the images in relation to your conclusions for website maintenance.