Think of a website like a house. It’s built on a foundation of code strategy and content, designed to your liking, is a direct reflection of who you are, and is the first impression people have of you if they are meeting you at your home for the first time. A website, like a house, needs upkeep for it to continue functioning the way it’s supposed to (being a good first impression, locking and remaining secure, keeping the day-to-day running smoothly). Similar to a home, a website is a large investment and you want to make sure you are protecting your investment right?
At AOR, we believe in and see that your website has the unique ability to address your audience’s needs related to your business offering, making them feel seen and heard. That’s why we put our expertise to work to ensure it is as optimized as possible to continue delivering the results you need from now on.
It’s the practice of continuously checking in on your website’s core code health and performance, from SEO to UX, anything that could affect the functionality of your site.
Keeping your website up-to-date could mean the difference between a few loyal visitors to your site, and a whole stream of new engagement and customers.
It’s all about your users and the success of your goals. Website maintenance helps you retain a loyal customer base, impress new users, and achieve your business goals (like increased sales for example). Website maintenance helps prevent technical issues that could lead to downtime, improve user experience, drive users to key conversions, and ensure a high rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) for targeted relevant keywords.
We will talk a lot about frequency later on because if you go too long without maintenance, your website will suffer. Things will start to run more slowly, you’ll stop converting leads, you may potentially house malware and get hacked, and problems on problems on problems. Your site could even stop working altogether.
Benefits:
There are a whole slew of website maintenance tasks we could talk to you about, and all are important. To start, let’s talk about four maintenance tasks we think are critical.
The following four website maintenance tasks are important when it comes to frequency specifically. These are the kinds of tasks that will cause your site to break, stop performing well, or even cause some legal issues if not taken care of. It’s our recommendation to clients that we take a look at these four key tasks every month.
We work in WordPress, so for any of our clients whom we built a website for, we recommend updating plugins as soon as a new version is released. Typically, WordPress plugin authors will release a new version every month, so it’s important to keep up. New versions often contain website health updates such as bug fixes, security patches, and new features. Outdated plugins can cause all other kinds of issues that are much easier to avoid than fix later.
If you have a security breach or lose any data for any reason, having a backup of your information could save you. By performing regular backups, if something ever does happen, the website can be restored to its previous state.
We encourage you to also continually do browser checks and testing to make sure your site looks good and is functioning properly within each browser type. This includes mobile responsiveness as well. By ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, you’ll provide a seamless experience for your users across all devices. It is important to regularly test and optimize your browser responsiveness.
We work with our clients to constantly update back-end SEO markers such as title tags, as well as page headings, internal links, alt texts, etc — all in an effort to include keywords and improve and protect rankings on Google. On-page SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, and requires constant attention. We work to identify SEO technical, on-site and off-site issues such as: redirect chain audits, development of up-to-date unique content, and backlink audits. Doing this helps your audience and website users find and visit your website more often. It is critical to have an active SEO strategy to keep up with Google’s constantly changing algorithm. We believe regular technical audits, like the ones we do, and a strategic content calendar are essential to continue to improve search rankings.
Tools we use: SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Search Console, Siteimprove
This is where the legal jargon comes into play. If you are constantly updating and maintaining your site (like we’ve recommended that you do), accessibility testing should be part of your process. We recommend a full accessibility audit every 3 months, but additional ‘check-ups’ more frequently can help with ongoing compliance with the WCAG and other accessibility organizations. Ensuring your GDPR opt-in banner is active and up to compliance, and performing regular ADA compliance checks against WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines is essential. We go more in-depth on this topic here, so give it a read to learn more.
Tools we use: Monsido, Siteimprove, Wave Accessibility Tool
While there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to content update frequency, we recommend that our clients update content, add blogs, or even add website content to certain pages as frequently as it makes sense to keep them up to date. Certain pages, like blog pages, might require weekly or monthly updates, while others, like a contact page, may not. Keeping your content up-to-date and relevant makes good business sense from a digital marketing, SEO, and user experience perspective.
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The following types of website maintenance are important, however, they aren’t as time-sensitive as the above four. Not maintaining these areas of your website won’t cause your site to fall apart, but they are still important for good business sense and overall site health to continue to optimize for conversions and a healthy user experience.
Design and functionality updates are like getting a fresh coat of paint on your house — it’s not necessary but it will make you look better. Updates like these might involve redesigns, improving navigation, or incorporating user feedback to enhance overall usability. A healthy UX budget will allow for strategic website changes to be made based on real user data collected through competitor audits, A/B testing, heat maps, and other analytics tools.
We love analytics. It’s something we do very well at AOR, and we encourage our clients to regularly monitor their analytics to gather insights and make data-driven decisions. You can learn a lot about your user’s behavior, traffic sources, and other information and then use the data you gather to make decisions about other parts of your website maintenance like content, design, and functionality. Regular monitoring of key metrics including sessions, conversions, and traffic patterns can support goals whether those be high engagement metrics on blog posts or more contact form fills on a request a quote page.
Tools we use: GA4, Search Console, GTM, Looker Studio
There are two major pros to hiring a professional for your website maintenance needs.
Trying to do all of this on your own is time-consuming, you may run into technical challenges you don’t know how to overcome, and the expertise of an experienced web developer will help you maintain your website at a high level.
If any of this information feels relevant to you, give us a call. We have years of experience with website design, development, and maintenance we want to help make your website work for you, not against you.