Website Maintenance Checklist to Avoid Technical Glitches in 2022
As you know websites need to be maintained and updated regularly. We put together a list of things every webmaster needs to do on a weekly/monthly and annually basis. It is important that your visitors always see the latest content and information on your site.
If you don’t update it might confuse them and they will look for other sources of information which can lead to loss of traffic and eventually loss of income for your business or organization.
It is that time of year again where it becomes necessary to maintain your website, if you have one. There are key factors to take into consideration this time of year because there are certain things that need doing before you get any visitors or search engines crawling the site.
Weekly/ Monthly Tasks
1. Backup your site data
You might think this is no big deal since the information on your website is “just text”, but trust me, that’s not true. WordPress stores all of your posts in a relational database, which means that each post has one or more references to other content on the site (pages, images, tags, categories, etc.).
If you delete an important post accidentally and the backup was not completed for whatever reason… Goodbye blog! Or at least goodbye until you’ve painstakingly recreated it from scratch.
The solution? Perform regular backups of your website files and database so if something unfortunate ever happens again you can simply restore a previous version of everything without having to start over.
2. Check for spam comments and posts
Spam can kill your blog authority by decreasing the quality of content on it. No one likes to read low-quality or duplicate contents, so keep an eye out for them and delete them as soon as possible.
You can use plugins like Akisment, Disallow Comments, COMMENT Snitch and WP No Spam which will help you to hide, stop the generation of spam comments & block registration spammers from creating accounts on your site.
Spammers are clever little buggers which is why they sometimes slip their way onto your site unnoticed. One of the best ways to prevent this from happening is by checking every now and again for new spam messages , especially if you have comments turned on.
3. Update your themes and plugins
Themes and plugins are a great way to add functionality or fix problems on your website but they also need updates from time to time in order to prevent security loopholes. The problem is that many users don’t think about them until something goes wrong. Bummer!
Therefore, protect your site and ensure its safety by updating plugins and themes when necessary. Keep in mind that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
You can also use a backup plugin like VaultPress, Full Backup or BackupBuddy in order to save your data and speed up the process of restoring when you make changes to your website files.
4. Ensure that your forms work properly
Many websites use contact forms because they help their visitors share information with them quickly and easily or provide an easy way for website owners to interact with their clients.
However, sometimes forms malfunction (e.g., when asked too many questions) and this happens mostly when website owners fail to keep WordPress and its plugins up-to-date.
So what you need to do is double check your forms and ensure that they work properly before launching a new site or an upgrade. You may as well throw your website into the trashcan at this point because you won’t be getting any leads or sales if people can’t contact you!
5. Check for spam comments and posts
One of the most common problems that bloggers come across when maintaining their websites is spam comments and posts. Just like any other platform, WordPress is no different when it comes to spammers who want nothing but take advantage of your blog with irritating ads (e.g., fake antivirus alerts). Before such things start showing on your pages, make sure you know how to protect your blog.
6. Update your themes and plugins
Updating is one of the most important tasks that you should do after launching a new website or updating your old site to the latest version. Developers or in any web design agency will release bug fixes quite often, so if you want to keep your site working properly, it’s best to subscribe to their updates.
At the very least, you need to update your theme (especially when there are major changes in design). WordPress itself can be updated through Dashboard → Updates menu item, whereas other extensions like plugins generally require manual installation of new files.
Annually Tasks
1 . Check and Fix Broken Links
There is nothing more frustrating than having a link on your website which doesn’t work. To avoid this, make sure that all of your links are checked and fixed after some time.
There are several free tools available for checking broken links, use them to check for pages with broken links. Some of the most popular ones include Xenu Link Sleuth, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Site Sucker and Offline Google PageRank Checker. Broken links are a big problem for both browsers and search bots alike.
Browsers cannot access them because they do not work while search bots can’t crawl them properly which will show up in your SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) if they find too many broken links on your pages. Luckily, fixing them is not too difficult.
2. Test Your Site On Multiple Devices
This is very important. I know that everyone has their phones or tablets nearby when using desktop computers or laptops, but not everyone uses those devices while browsing the web.
If they are on a mobile device then they will come across websites that aren’t optimized for mobile browsing, making them close out of it and bounce over another website.
3. Double Check Your Backups
Backups are essential, they provide protection against things like viruses, ransomware and errors in code which can crash your site. Make sure you check these before anything happens to your website.
It is important to regularly back up your website. This will help you restore them later in the event that something goes wrong or if you want to revert to a previous version of your site as per specific dates such as changes made over the holidays or other events (e.g., elections, etc.). There are several ways to go about this:
– A) backup – email backups of content and images by saving them in .txt, .doc, pdf formats;
– B) online storage and digital library for printed material and multimedia files;
– C) offline storage on external hard drives and cloud services like Google Drive and OneDrive;
4. Optimize Your Database
Database optimization will keep the database running smoothly by defragmenting it after deleting large chunks of data from it etc. This helps with making changes to the content management system (CMS) without having major problems with read/write speeds slowing everything down.
Review Your Domain And Hosting Renewals These should be done about a month before your hosting or domain expires. If you don’t, then that may cause another site error which would require extensive repair work.
5. Review Your Domain and Hosting Renewals
The first step in maintaining your web-site is checking to make sure your domain name registration as well as hosting package are up-to-date. Sometimes it is hard to remember when you have renewed these services, but one way of finding out is by looking at the order confirmation email that you received when you paid for them.
Another option is to login into your account with the domain registrar or hosting provider and check if they are still active. It takes less than ten minutes to do this task which can save you many hours of frustration if your services are not renewed.
Conclusion
When you invest in a website for your small business, the last thing on your mind is maintaining it. But this task should not go ignored as hackers will do anything they can get away with just to take advantage of vulnerabilities and make trouble for businesses like yours!
Maintaining websites takes time outside our day-to-day operations so we have professionals who specialize only these types of jobs around here which means less stress when things come up – plus there are never any surprises because everyone knows what needs done beforehand.
