Critical Website Maintenance Mistakes to Avoid
Website maintenance is essential to making sure your customers have a consistent experience. Check out these maintenance tips to avoid.
Hurrah! You've finally reached the end of the creation and development of your website. Now, you can finally launch it and tell the world about the great products and services your brand has to offer.
First things first: Congratulations!
Here's the thing though. That's not the end of having a website. In fact, the launch is far from being the omega of website ownership.
There's a long list of website maintenance tasks that follows a launch. You can't just put your site up on the Web and forget about it. Well, technically you can, but doing so is a surefire way for it to fail.
After all that time, effort, and resources you put into having your site created, the last thing you want is for it go down the drain.
So, make sure you avoid these site maintenance mistakes at all costs.
1. Forgetting the Necessary Updates
Here's a little something to put website maintenance in a clearer perspective:
At the time of this writing, there were nearly 1.9 billion active websites. And every minute that pass, another 570 new ones go online.
Impressive right? Well, not really. Since the owners of many of these have already abandoned them.
They may still be up and accessible, but no one bothers with them already. Because they no longer receive any updates.
So... Take the time to think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of potential site visitors. Would you still bother with a website that features the same exact content as it did when you last visited it?
Definitely not.
As such, you want to keep things fresh. Because that's what major search engines, Google in particular, look for when it comes to ranking. And because that's the key to holding on to the favorable perception of web users.
Whether it's content, layout, design, or bugs, instilling in your mind they all need updates is the first critical step to a properly-maintained website.
2. Ignoring the King
Who's the king when it comes to anything Internet-related?
None other than content, of course. Whichever part of the World Wide Web you go to, the first thing you look for is content, right? The same thing applies to search engines and web users.
That's why website content is king, and will always be. Anything that has to do with what your website features, be it written text, graphics, images, videos, even ads, all fall under "content." And you need to keep bringing new ones in as part of your website maintenance protocol.
Because again, Google uses freshness of content as a primary ranking factor. And there's also the fact that people love news, anything that gives them an insight as to what's happening. Or what they need to know, even those that they didn't know they actually need.
Take Twitter, for example. People have a never-ending love for this platform because it's packed full of news. It's a haven for fresh information. No wonder it has about 330 million active users.
So, take a page out of Twitter's book and make sure your website maintenance strategy includes the following content updates:
- Product updates, especially if your website features an e-commerce element
- New product page and navigation (and don't forget to put this in your sitemap!)
- Announcements about discontinuing a product.
- Future price changes, deals, money-saving offers, and other promotions
- Company news, particularly if newspapers, other publications, and other businesses mention you or review your products/services
You may also have some content you can repurpose through simple updates and changes. Updating them is also a good way to keep your web content fresh, thus, well-maintained.
Just check out how innovative the Climb Online website is, with all its creative web design, elements, and fresh content. That's the kind of web content you want for your own site.
3. Not Telling Your Users about Feature Additions
Adding new features as soon as possible is also key to correct website maintenance. For instance, you run a site that covers productivity and efficiency. And you only recently started working with a project and task collaboration service.
Now that you have access to such a service, you may want to offer one of its features on your site. Maybe a free download button. Perhaps a web time-tracking monitor.
Whichever feature you want to add, you need to put it up your site as soon as possible. In a way, this is much like offering new content to your visitors. And as previously mentioned, new content is all the rage amongst web users.
4. Not Having a Back-Up
Website crashes are a fact of the digital life. And the thing is, it can happen to any site, giant corporation or not.
Remember last year's huge Amazon downtime that caused problems for hundreds of thousands of other sites? Or that time when Pokemon Go suddenly became Pokemon No?
Your website may not be as huge as these, but it doesn't mean your site won't experience downtimes. That's why a robust website maintenance policy should include a back up of the entire site.
And it's best you keep a copy of your own. Yes, your web host may tell you that they have a backup on their servers, but it's possible that it doesn't include the recent changes you made.
So, before the site crashes leaving you with unsaved content, create a backup of everything.
5. Thinking You Can Skip on Speed Testing after Website Maintenance
After avoiding all the four web maintenance mistakes mentioned above, the last thing you want is to render them kind of useless because you failed to test your site's speed. You need to constantly put your site's speed to the test, making sure it has below-200ms server response time.
Speed tests are particularly important after launching updates, installing add-ons, and general site maintenance. No one, including you, likes to deal with super slow-loading pages. Even Google uses page speed as a ranking factor.
Remember: Web surfers want speed and convenience when searching for something online, so having slow-loading web pages can make them all go away in an instant.
Make Your Website the Best Online Marketing Tool You Have
As you can see, website maintenance is as important as all the pre-launch steps you took in creating and developing it. It's a huge player in the longevity of your site. And of course, it can have a great contribution to how effective your site is as a marketing tool.
Ready for more amazing website design inspiration? Check out our online collection then! You may just find the perfect idea for your next website update.
