Sometimes a bit of maintenance and care on your current website can do the trick. But where do you start? Our website maintenance checklist narrows down everything you need to do weekly, monthly, quarterly and even yearly into easy-to-follow lists.
Particularly useful for small businesses with little resource, this website maintenance plan provides clear guidance on what you should check and some free tools to help you make some of the actions. Read the full article or download our handy checklist for later!
And of course, if you need a helping hand, our friendly agency of digital marketing experts can act as an extension of your own business. We are here to help!
Weekly
Each week, set aside 30 minutes as a recurring event, and book time in to just focus on the following web maintenance jobs. This small but important investment of time ensures that you can keep on top of anything that may stop your website from producing conversions or leads.
- Actually visit your website - Sounds super simple, but a lot of people miss it. If you’re never looking at your own website, how do you know if there are any problems?
- Check all pages load without errors - Check all pages load without errors - This can be done during your manual check, though you can also use various tools to monitor this automatically such as Google Search Console, or you can use a dedicated free tool like Uptime Robot to be notified if your website ever goes down.
- Check all forms work properly - Submit each version of a form you have (contact, newsletter, lead gen), and check that you are receiving those leads.
- Check for any broken links - As well as the pages, and forms, you’ll want to make sure that any clickable links within each page are working and don’t result in a broken page. You can use a handy chrome extension such as Check My Links to do this quickly and easily.
- Check comments and remove any spam - If you allow comments on your website, you’ll need to double check for any spam and remove them where possible. For any real comments take the time to respond if possible.
- Backup your website - Taking regular backups means that if anything goes wrong you do not have to worry, everything is saved.
- Apply any updates - Particularly if you are using a Wordpress site, make sure to apply any updates to keep things running smoothly.
Monthly
Allocate an extended session of one hour per month from your weekly 30-minute routine to address the following tasks effectively. By dedicating this additional time, you can ensure thorough maintenance of essential monthly tasks.
- Check website loading speed - Users want super quick loading websites, this provides good user experience and helps with your website SEO. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to quickly get an idea of your site speed, and recommendations to speed it up.
- Review website statistics - KKnowing how users who convert are acting on your website means you can replicate their behaviour to boost leads or sales. It can also help you identify underperforming pages, so you know which to work on first. There are many tools to choose from to do this, but arguably the most comprehensive and well-known is Google Analytics (GA4). You can also get a lot of information from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Add fresh content to the website - This should be done more regularly if possible. But depending on your service or offering, your content may be fairly static for most of the year. If this is the case, make the most of a blog, or resource information to add fresh content regularly.
Quarterly
There are other bigger tasks that are very important but can be done every quarter. You may want to set aside a day for this, which once a quarter isn’t all that much really. These activities may result in further jobs that can be completed across the quarter period. You can consider outsourcing larger tasks like content writing or image updates to ensure that they are completed on time.
- Update your content - It’s very easy for content to get out of date - previous offers or specials, referring to certain years or months, or closure information. Have a good read through your content. Check that everything is in place, and note/update anything that is now out of date. If you’ve been looking at your stats monthly, you may have a better idea of which pages you want to prioritise for a bit of a content refresh.
- Update your imagery - It’s not just your content that can get out of date, imagery can be easily overlooked. Make sure anything with graphics on is still relevant to your service (think special offers with end dates), check your team pages, as well as just generally to see if there are any newer, fresher images you can use. Also, run your images through a compressor and re-upload them. They will look the same to a user, but take far less time to load.
- Change your passwords - Keep on top of your security, and make sure to do a little change up of your passwords. Use a secure online password storage such as Bitwarden to keep everything in place.
Yearly
Lastly, there are tasks that often slip under the radar because they occur just once a year. Depending on who else you work with, this could need just an hour or two to update, or potentially a few days. However long you need, make sure to time this just right. If, for example, your business operates a Jan - Dec calendar year, and your busiest period is in December, consider tackling some of these yearly tasks in November instead.
- Update the copyright date in your website footer - A super simple change, but can be very easily missed off. If you work with someone else on your website, be sure to pop them a reminder to update the year.
- Renew your web domain - A well looked after website is no use if you don’t own the domain. Make sure to renew your domain, hosting and any other similar domains you would like. As with the copyright, if someone else looks after this for you, just double check they’re on top of this.
- Align your strategy with any agencies or suppliers - Here is where you need to spend a few days of time. Your website strategy should be factored into your overall marketing strategy. Are you looking to redesign your website? To add new functionality? Are you going to be running a campaign where your website may need extra server support to stop the website crashing? Work with your agency, your suppliers and your partners to make sure everyone has a rough plan of what is happening across the year. For the sake of a couple of days, this will help speed everything up across the year, and leave you with a smoother running plan
Top tip: remember your website isn’t just for you, it’s for your users. Focus on keeping your website running as smoothly as possible, with it being easy to navigate, and offering necessary and useful information to your users. Having a long-term view of how this will look will give you clarity on what to focus on. Doing all of this will stop any wasted time and effort on impulse changes that don’t really benefit users.
If you’re looking to work with a digital marketing agency to improve your marketing, or lighten the load, then speak to one of our team. MMS is a full-service agency with over 25 years' experience, offering digital, print and strategy services across the UK.
Why not download our handy checklist to keep or read more about the work we’ve done previously.
