Your website is online, but is it still performing the same as when it was first launched? Often, websites become slow, error-prone, or features don't work optimally over time. To keep your website safe, fast, and functioning properly, regular maintenance is key. Let's discuss further.
What is Website Maintenance?
This process is very important once your website is live. Website maintenance is a series of planned and ongoing actions. The goal is to monitor, update, optimize, and protect all parts of your website. This is not just a fix when a problem occurs, but more of a preventative effort to keep the website in top condition.
Activities include software updates (such as CMS, themes, plugins), security scans, speed optimization, data backups, broken link repairs, and content updates.
A website is often the first point of contact for potential customers or users. If your website is slow, full of errors, or looks outdated, this can immediately give a negative impression. Technical issues, such as a non-functioning contact form or failed checkout process, can disrupt operations and lead to lost opportunities.
Technology is constantly evolving, new security threats are emerging, and user expectations are increasing. An unmaintained website quickly becomes outdated, insecure, and vulnerable to attack. Therefore, website maintenance is an important investment to ensure your digital assets continue to function as intended and support your business.
In using a website, of course everyone has different goals or needs. In order for these needs to be met, the website must be managed routinely, weekly, monthly and quarterly annually. There are many important things that you should know when learning what website maintenance is. Starting from the description, purpose, to the methods applied to carry out website maintenance itself.
In general, web maintenance is an effort to make a website work well, according to the goals and needs of its owner or user. Meanwhile, the method of maintaining this website varies, depending on the needs of each website manager.
In managing the website itself, there are many aspects that you must pay attention to. Starting from the appearance to the website security system that must follow the latest rules and standards.
As a website developer, you may already understand how to manage a website properly. However, if you are still a layman and want to learn to manage a website properly, continue to read explanation this time.
Why is regular website maintenance important?
Performing regular maintenance provides many important benefits. In addition to maintaining website performance, maintenance is also carried out to improve visitor experience, maintain security, increase visibility in search engines, and strengthen the overall business reputation in digital media.
1. Improve Website Visitor Experience
In our opinion, there are two things that will be the main focus of your website visitors: content quality and user experience on the website. If your content is not relevant, or they are not comfortable seeing the appearance of the website, then it is likely that these visitors will not return.
By doing regular maintenance, you can ensure that your site remains responsive, easy to navigate, and has new and informative content. This will make visitors feel at home on your site and increase the likelihood that they will return in the future.
2. Maintain Website Security
Currently, security has become a very important factor in the digital world. Hacker and malware attacks can take personal and sensitive data from your website visitors. Especially if your website is an e-commerce website that has a large customer database.
If an attack occurs, all customer data will fall into the wrong hands, and your business credibility will definitely be affected. Therefore, make sure you do maintenance that includes security updates, monitoring suspicious activity, and cleaning spam. You can prevent viruses and hacker attacks that can harm your site.
3. SEO Improvement Strategy
SEO optimization is the key to increasing your site's visibility in search engines like Google. By performing maintenance such as content updates, fixing broken links, meta tags and keyword evaluations, you can improve your site's ranking in search results. The higher your site's ranking, the more likely potential visitors are to find and visit your site.
Especially since the helpful content update on Google's search algorithm in 2022, quoted from the Google page directly, quality and relevant content is increasingly prioritized to appear on the first page of searches. Therefore, we think it is very important to always check your website's SEO performance.
Search engines like Google tend to favor well-maintained websites. Technical aspects like site speed (including Core Web Vitals metrics), security (using HTTPS), healthy link structure, and fresh content are factors that search engines look at. Good maintenance directly supports these factors.
4. Building Business Reputation
A well-maintained website not only provides a pleasant experience for visitors, but also reflects professionalism and concern for customers. A website that is informative, easy to navigate, and secure will make customers feel trusted and appreciated, which will ultimately help improve your business's overall reputation.
5. User Experience (UX)
A good user experience makes visitors more comfortable and trust your website. Maintenance ensures all elements are functioning as they should.
For example, ensuring there are no broken links, forms are usable, navigation is easy to understand, and the content presented is relevant.
6. Downtime Prevention
A website that is down, whether due to technical issues or an attack, can be very costly. Routine maintenance, including uptime monitoring and security measures, helps prevent unexpected downtime. Having a solid backup strategy is also essential. In the event of a major problem, backups allow for a quick site recovery.
What are examples of maintenance tasks?
Here is a breakdown of the specific tasks that are commonly performed.
1. Software Updates
This is a fundamental task that involves regular updates to the core Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, as well as installed themes and plugins.
Updates are essential to patch security holes, fix bugs, ensure compatibility, improve performance, and sometimes add new features. Always perform a full backup before making major updates. If possible, test updates on a staging environment (a non-public copy of your site) first.
2. Security Checks
This involves regularly scanning your site for malware or other vulnerabilities. Ensure that your SSL certificate (for HTTPS) is always valid and installed correctly.
Consider using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) for an added layer of protection. Manage user access well, enforce strong passwords, and use spam protection on forms.
3. Performance Optimization
Regularly measure page load speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Optimize media assets like images by compressing and resizing them as needed. Use modern image formats like WebP when possible.
Minify CSS and JavaScript files (remove whitespace and unnecessary characters) to reduce file size. Use caching techniques (browser and server-side) to speed up load times for visitors. Make sure the site design is responsive (displays well on various screen sizes) and is compatible with major browsers. Pay attention to and optimize Core Web Vitals metrics (LCP, INP, CLS) according to Google standards.
4. Backup and Recovery Management
Make full backups of website files and databases regularly. The frequency of backups should be adjusted; dynamic sites such as e-commerce may need daily backups, while blogs may be sufficient weekly.
Store backup files in a safe location separate from the main hosting server (for example, cloud storage). It is very important to test the restore process regularly to ensure that the backups you have are actually working.
5. Content and Link Audit
Scan the site regularly to find and fix broken internal and external links. Review page content regularly to ensure all information is still accurate and relevant. Update or delete outdated content.
Adding new content or updating old content regularly is also good for keeping the site alive and relevant.
6. Database Optimization
Over time, databases on CMS like WordPress can become large and less efficient. Clean out data that is no longer needed, such as excessive revisions of old posts, deleted spam comments, or leftover data from inactive plugins. This can help reduce the size of your database and potentially improve site response time.
7. Continuous Monitoring
Use an external service to continuously check that your website is accessible (uptime monitoring). Check server logs and site activity (if applicable) for suspicious access patterns. Review data from web analytics tools regularly to understand how visitors are interacting with your site and identify areas for improvement.
How often do websites need maintenance?
How often do you need to perform these tasks? It depends on a few things. Factors include how often the content is updated, how complex the site is, traffic volumes, and risk levels (such as if it handles sensitive data).
Here are some general guidelines for frequency that can be adjusted:
1. Daily Tasks
Recommended for highly dynamic sites such as large e-commerce or news portals. This usually includes data backups and intensive security monitoring if the risk is high. Uptime monitoring usually runs automatically every few minutes.
2. Weekly Tasks
This is a good minimum frequency for most websites. Typically includes data backups, checking and applying critical software updates (especially security patches), a quick check for broken links or errors, testing the functionality of the main form, and cleaning up spam comments.
a. Check Pages and Links Still Working
Every week, take the time to check every page and link on your website. Make sure that there are no error pages or broken links. This is important to ensure that your visitors' experience remains smooth and is not disrupted by inaccessible pages or non-functioning links.
b. Check All Website Component Updates
Always make sure that all website components are updated. This includes themes, plugins, and all other features that you use. Updates can include bug fixes, security enhancements, or new features that will improve the performance and functionality of your site.
Updated tools will be more difficult to penetrate by viruses and hacker attacks and keep the site's performance running optimally.
c. Delete All Spam Comments
It is common knowledge for website owners about spam comments. Both old and new websites are vulnerable to spam comments. The easiest way is to disable the automatic comment feature, so you can sort out which comments are spam and which are not.
You can also use additional anti-spam features such as Google reCAPTCHA, which will provide additional measures to prevent comment spam bots.
3. Monthly Tasks
Suitable for more in-depth analysis. For example, analyzing the performance and speed of important pages, a more thorough broken link check, database optimization (for CMS), a more detailed security review, and reviewing web analytics reports.
a. Backup Website Data
Every month, make sure to create a backup copy of all website data and files. This is very important to avoid losing valuable information in the event of an update error or malware attack.
With a backup, you can easily restore your website to its original condition before the problem occurred. You can ask your developer to do this, or if you use a CMS like WordPress, there are many backup plugins that you can use for free.
b. Evaluate SEO Performance
Check your website's SEO (Search Engine Optimization) performance using tools like Google Search Console. Analyze the performance of your content, including keyword rankings, number of clicks, and impressions.
This evaluation will help you understand whether your content is still relevant and effective in attracting visitors. From here, you can plan a strategy to improve or update content that needs more attention.
c. Check Website Speed Regularly
Website loading speed is a key factor in user experience. Make sure to regularly check your website speed using tools like PageSpeed Insights.
If there is a problem with loading speed, identify the cause and take steps to fix it immediately. Ensuring that your site remains fast and responsive will increase visitor satisfaction and help maintain traffic levels.
d. Website Page Loading Speed Test Tools
To check page speed, you can use various free tools available online such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom Website Speed Test. These tools will provide an in-depth analysis of the factors that affect your site's loading speed and provide recommendations for improving it.
According to Google's official page, it is said that a good page speed score is at 90. Even so, this does not guarantee a good visitor experience, you need to pay attention to the layout and responsiveness of the website.
e. Make sure the website is always up to date
Make sure to check and update all components of your website, including themes, plugins, and other features, especially important features related to visitor experience.
Product pages, payment flows, are usually important points related to marketing that you need to pay attention to. Also evaluate existing content and update or add new content as needed.
f. Watch for Virus or Hacker Attacks
Monthly, monitor for signs of virus or hacker attacks, such as unknown changes to your site, sudden drops in performance, or unknown files on your server.
Take immediate preventative measures, such as changing your passwords, auditing your website, and contacting your hosting provider if necessary. Keep your data backed up and updated regularly. With these precautions, your site will remain safe from potentially damaging cyber threats.
4. Quarterly Tasks (Every 3 Months)
A good time for a more strategic review. This can include a content audit (identifying outdated or underperforming content), a design and navigation flow (UX) review, compatibility testing across browsers and devices, and testing the backup restore process in a staging environment.
a. Check Website Contact Info
When performing website maintenance, it is important to routinely check the contact information listed on your website. Make sure that all contact details, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and store/office addresses (if any) are still current and accessible to visitors.
Clear contact information will help visitors to contact you more easily, whether for questions, customer support, or business cooperation.
b. Check Website Hosting
Every three months, evaluate your website hosting provider. Check the active period of the hosting service and disk usage to ensure that the website continues to run smoothly without any obstacles. Don't forget to also check the active period of the domain. Usually, hosting providers will send an email notification when your hosting or domain is about to expire.
In addition, evaluate the performance of your current hosting. If there are problems such as limited capacity or unsatisfactory performance, you can consider upgrading your hosting package or looking for another hosting provider that better suits your needs.
c. Website Structure and Content Updates
Although rare, there's nothing wrong with updating the structure or theme of your website. If you want to do this, evaluate quarterly or annually. Does the current structure and design meet your business needs? Or do you need to update your site to stay relevant and more appealing to your target audience?
Make sure the content you present provides valid and valuable information, and is easy for your target audience to understand.
5. Annual Tasks
Focus on long-term administrative and strategic aspects. This can include updating the Privacy Policy or Terms & Conditions pages, ensuring the copyright year in the footer is correct, renewing domain name registrations, hosting, and SSL certificates, and evaluating whether a design refresh or full SEO audit is needed.
Does maintenance mode affect SEO?
Website maintenance is closely related to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) performance. Neglecting maintenance can actively hinder your SEO efforts.
1. Technical Health
Tasks like fixing broken links and ensuring a good site structure help search engines like Google crawl and index your content efficiently.
2. Speed and Core Web Vitals
Page load speed is an important ranking factor. Many performance optimization tasks in maintenance (image optimization, code, caching) directly aim to improve site speed and Core Web Vitals scores.
3. Site Security
Using HTTPS (via an SSL certificate) is a positive signal to Google. Protecting your site from malware and hacking is also important, as infected sites can be penalized or removed from search results.
4. Content and User Experience
Regularly updating your content signals that your site is active and relevant. A good user experience (easy navigation, fast loading times) also contributes to the metrics that Google cares about. Overall, maintenance is an important and ongoing part of an effective SEO strategy.
Conclusion
Website maintenance isn’t just an extra technical task that can be skipped. It’s an ongoing process that’s crucial to keeping your website functioning properly, safe from threats, and providing a positive experience for visitors.
By performing regular, planned maintenance, you’re making a significant investment to ensure your digital assets continue to provide value and support your business goals in the long term.
