Under the Hood: How to Keep Your Website Humming

But just like your other corporate assets – your headquarters building or your company cars and trucks – your website needs regular, periodic attention to make sure all the parts are working properly.

Many of our customers here at Fuel Media rely on our backroom experts to maintain and update their websites. That’s our business. But every company, large or small, should assign someone to perform regular maintenance checks. 

Here’s how to do it:

Weekly

Weekly checks to make sure that the day-to-day functionality of your website is at peak performance will help find and correct problems.

• Check that all of your pages are loading quickly and without errors.
• Run a site back-up and store it securely.
• Check on and install any pending updates to your website software and plug-ins or apps.
• Make sure all your onsite forms are running properly.
• Remove any spam comments from pages and posts.
• Check the links, internal and external, and make sure they are still working properly.
• Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect.
• Keep adding new blog posts to keep your customers engaged and to encourage SEO traffic to your site.

Monthly

• Check the load speed of your site and look for items that may be slowing down performance, like extra-large images, or app interfaces.
• Review your security scans and make sure they are working.
• Analyze the web statistics from the previous month or months and look for performance discrepancies.
• Review the blog postings for the last month and check for relevancy and response.

Quarterly

Look at the big-picture elements: assess the website’s overall structure, content, backup procedures and automation and see if anything needs attention or upgrading.

• Look at your website’s design and appearance–is there anything that can be improved?
• Look at your images and graphics–are they still relevant and do they need upgrading?
• Review the SEO and meta titles and descriptions for relevance.
• Look at your pop-ups, forms and call to action and tweak if necessary.
• Are there parts of your website that can be automated for better efficiency?
• Test your website on all devices and browsers your customer may use–desktop, tablet and phone–to make sure the appearance and performance is the same.
• Review your advertising and marketing campaigns and change or update if necessary.

Annually

Once a year, perhaps when the website domain registration is due, take the time to consider your website from a macro perspective.

• Update any references to the current calendar year.
• Review each page for content, grammar, typos and relevance.
• Check your email addresses and delete any that are excessive.
• Take a look at the overall website design and theme and decide if a change or upgrade is needed.
• Look at your top-performing blog posts and see if they can be updated with new content.

Using this framework, you can keep on top of changes, eliminate bad performance, and continue to provide your customers with an excellent and relevant interaction with your company.