The Ultimate Website Maintenance Checklist

“A website is never finished” is a mantra we hold dear at Frogspark. Maintaining a website requires regular check-ups, frequent updates, and a bit of TLC to keep it relevant, secure, and running at optimal performance.

Your website is often the first point of contact for potential customers, so keeping it running smoothly is crucial. While it’s important to be flexible and creative with your business website, having a checklist helps you stay on top of the most essential maintenance tasks. We’ve crafted this comprehensive guide to explore the importance of website maintenance, outline key tasks, and provide a detailed checklist to keep your site in tip-top shape.

 

Why Is Website Maintenance Important?

Regular website maintenance ensures your site remains healthy, encourages continued traffic growth, and strengthens your SEO rankings and visibility. The benefits of maintenance can be tangible, such as keeping your users engaged with fresh content and maintaining an up-to-date design, but there are also less visible advantages like enhancing security and boosting key performance factors, including SEO and site speed.

• User Experience: Regular updates and maintenance prevent issues such as broken links, slow load times, and outdated content, ensuring visitors are happy, engaged and not frustrated.
• Security: Regular maintenance helps protect your site from cyber threats by ensuring all software and plugins are up to date.
• SEO: Search engines favour websites that are regularly updated and perform well. Regular maintenance is like an MOT for your site, and can help undoubtedly contribute positively towards your search engine rankings.
• Performance: Routine checks and updates enhance your website’s speed and functionality, which are critical for retaining visitors and improving conversion rates.

 

What Does Website Maintenance Include?

Regular Backups

Regularly backing up your website’s data is crucial to prevent data loss, and can help when mistakes or errors occur.

At Frogspark all the websites we design and host have automated daily backups with Kinsta as a minimum, but hourly ones are also available for those requiring more frequent backups. We also strongly encourage performing manual backups before any major updates take place. Your hosting provider should be able to set these up for you if they are not in place.

 

 

Security Updates

Updating security software, plugins, and the content management system (CMS) to protect against threats should also be done regularly. We recommend at least once a month, or as soon as major updates become available.

You can also set important plugins to update manually in WordPress and other platforms. We’d recommend enabling a roll-back plugin too (of which there are many available) just in case there’s an issue or conflict after the update has taken place. Again, backing up your website before an update is very sensible here.

 

Regular Performance Checks

We like to conduct regular performance audits on all our websites to monitor page speed and load times. Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals are excellent tools for checking your site’s performance and running mini audits. They provide detailed advice on improving issues specific to your site.

 

 

Additionally, we strongly recommend keeping an eye on your site’s integrations and functionality. Regularly review your site’s plugins and apps to ensure everything is functioning correctly and determine if any are unnecessary or contributing to site bloat and slowing it down.

 

SEO Audits

Maintaining your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO) can be quite an undertaking. From checking for broken links and 404 errors to addressing technical issues, regular SEO audits are essential to keep your website performing at its best. By using tools such as Sitebulb and SEMRush, you can effectively track changes, identify problems, and implement improvements.

Regular SEO audits are not just about fixing issues; they are about continually optimising your site to meet the evolving standards of search engines and user expectations. We’d definitely recommend speaking with our SEO experts to get you started.

 

Content Updates

Keeping your content up to date involves both creating new content, such as blog posts and product pages, and updating existing content to add new information or ensure older articles remain relevant and accurate. Consistently refreshing your content not only keeps your audience engaged but can also enhance your site’s SEO by providing search engines with fresh, relevant material to index.

Among all the website maintenance tasks in this checklist, content updates might be the easiest for your team to undertake. However, they still represent a significant time investment, so it’s worth noting that not all content is worth updating.

Conducting a content audit can help identify those pages that will yield the best results with a refresh. This targeted approach helps maximise the impact of your content updates while saving time and resources.

 

 

Search Engine Optimisation

A significant part of your regular website maintenance should focus on improving your search engine rankings. Again, a site audit can really help to provide a comprehensive overview of your website, identifying areas that need optimisation. However, any optimisation should prioritise the user experience, not just the latest SEO trends, core updates and algorithms. By focusing on user-friendly improvements, you can enhance both your search engine performance and overall user satisfaction.

 

Key aspects of SEO optimisation include:

• Resolving technical issues that affect crawlability and indexability
• Enhancing site speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness.
• Optimising on-page elements such as keywords, content quality, and internal linking structures, and fixing broken links
• Off-page factors, including backlink profiles and social signals, should also be evaluated.
• And so much more…

Regular SEO audits help you stay ahead of algorithm changes, address issues promptly, and continually improve your website’s performance and visibility on search engines.

 

Usability Testing

Regular usability testing is essential for maintaining the functionality of your website. This might involve routinely checking key site features such as contact forms, navigation menus, and checkout processes to ensure they work correctly. Using heatmap data from Hotjar or Clarity can help to see where real users are struggling and whether or not they are able to perform those key functions on your site.

By identifying and fixing any issues promptly, you can prevent user frustration, reduce bounce rates, and enhance overall user satisfaction.

 

How Long Does Website Maintenance Take?

The time required for website maintenance can vary based on the complexity and size of your website. Routine tasks such as updates and backups might take a few hours each month, and you can definitely automate a few of the more menial or time-consuming tasks. However, more comprehensive tasks like content updates, SEO audits, and performance checks demand additional time and effort. Establishing a regular maintenance schedule is crucial to prioritise tasks effectively and ensure they are completed promptly.

 

Setting a Website Maintenance Schedule

To keep your website in top condition, a regular maintenance schedule might look something like this:

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Daily / Weekly

• Automated daily backups.
• Create new content or update existing.
• Check for broken links and 404 errors.
• Review website analytics for any unusual activity or traffic drops.

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Monthly

• Perform security updates for CMS, plugins, and themes.
• Test all forms to ensure they are functioning correctly.

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Quarterly

• Test website speed and performance on various browsers and devices.
• Review user feedback and implement necessary changes.
• Conduct and review any content audits to update or remove outdated information.
• Evaluate overall website design and user experience.

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Annually

• Conduct a comprehensive SEO audit.
• Plan and implement major updates or redesigns if necessary.
• Review and update hosting services.
• Renew domain names and SSL certificates.

 

How Often Should Website Content Be Updated?

Keeping your website content fresh is vital for both user engagement and SEO. Aim to update your content every week if possible, but only update your content if it is worthwhile doing so and not just to stick to a schedule.

That said, there are always things that will benefit from an update, which might include adding new blog posts, updating product information, or refreshing service pages with more up-to-date information.

 

 

Keep Your Website in Top Shape

Website maintenance is a continuous process that is crucial for maintaining the health, security, and performance of your site. While using a checklist is incredibly valuable, it’s equally vital to trust your expertise.

Your intuitive understanding of your audience, website, and business goals will beat any automated tool or search engine. By blending your own insights with a strong checklist, you can tackle the day-to-day stuff and dig into the bigger issues, giving your website that extra boost it needs to succeed.

At Frogspark, we offer easy-to-update, professional websites that stand the test of time, helping you keep your business website running smoothly and efficiently. Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your website maintenance needs.