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When you’re finishing your business website, you’ll probably start to hear quite often ‘And don’t forget about the website maintenance!’. And wow, that can set you on edge quite a bit when you have no technical skills or the desire to learn them.
In fact, I also posted a few videos recently on my Tiktok channel mentioning that you really can’t just forget your website after it’s done *big sigh of disappointment* and have to continue working on it.
A few questions kept cropping up:
So in this post I’ll be explaining exactly what you need to do on your website to keep it up to date, have all the wheels greased and running smoothly, how to do it easily and how often you need to do everything.
I also have made a website maintenance checklist that you can download and easily be able to look through at a glance. Bon appétit!
And first of all, is the questions we need to start off with:
You may wonder, “Does my website really need maintenance? It looks fine!”. YES. You do need to keep your website up to date. And YES, you need to do it even if it looks totally fine.
I thought that my website was working just fine. But after writing this post, I decided to go through my site again as I’ve been leaving for far too long. I found an absolutely hilarious amount of things that needed fixing. And I thought it had been doing alright!
There are just things you miss or don’t notice. There are things that just break something. It’s best if you manage these things before they end up having a negative effect on your website and business.
You need to check on your website REGULARLY and not just leave it sitting there. Here are some things you need to look out for:
What is it: Images that have been gobbled up by the fathom of the Internet, links that lead to nowhere, or to the 404 page.
Why is that bad? Your website visitors’ opinions of your site will get lower and lower when they start seeing big blank spaces where your images used to be or if they try and click a link only to discover that it leads nowhere. They certainly will be less convinced that you are trustworthy and professional and may just leave.
How do you fix it? Sometimes, images just break or you change the address of one of your pages and forget to update all the places you have linked to it on your website with the new address. Every other week, just click around on your website to see if there are any missing images or links that lead you to a 404 page.
🖼️ For images: Try reuploading the image. In most cases, it fixes the problem. If not, replace it with another image.
🔗 For links: Double-check that you’ve entered the correct link. If it still doesn’t work, you may just have to delete it entirely.
How often: Every 2 weeks
What is it: It’s best to double-check if your contact form (or sign-up forms, or any other form on your website) is actually doing what it’s supposed to do.
Do you really need to do this? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen websites with a contact form that just doesn’t send the message along. Or even worse (and more hilariously), doesn’t let you sign up for the website’s service or allow you to buy their product.
I’ve also worked on a few websites where the contact form definitely wasn’t sending the messages along and a lot of the time, no one even notices and just assumes no one is using the form.
How do you fix it? First of all, go through all of the forms on your website and test them out. Try sending a message to yourself and see if it actually shows in your inbox. Sign yourself up to your service with a test email. 📮📨
If one of the forms doesn’t work, you have to look into it further. There could be a huge array of different problems responsible for it but one of the most common is just that your ‘submit’ button isn’t doing anything. It’s just a blank box that does nothing. Check that it actually has a link prompting it to send the message to your inbox or go to the next page.
Still can’t figure it out? Ask me! I would be happy to help out.
How often: Every 3 months
What is it: Is there anything on your website that you’ve forgotten to take off the site (for example a New Year’s deal), or something you have forgotten to update (maybe you’ve raised your prices but some of your pages still state the old ones). Are you sure?
Why is that bad? This can be incredibly confusing and discouraging for visitors on your website which isn’t an ideal outcome.
How do you fix it? Again, just go through your website, read through everything and check that everything is up to date. If it isn’t, delete it or rewrite it! 🖍️
How often: Every month
What is it: Double-check that your navigation menu is still working. You may think it’s working. It may certainly not be working.
How do you fix it? Check that:
Do this for every navigational menu that you have, including any pages that you have linked in your footer.
How often: Every 3 months
What is it: Does your website look alright on MOBILE? (You wouldn’t believe how common of a problem this is.) Does everything work there?
How do you fix it? Go on your website through your actual phone. Check that it looks alright visually and that everything works. If not, go to the back-end of your website(located on different places in different platforms) and change what needs to be fixed.
How often: Every month
What is it: Test how slow your website is. If it is too slow, fix it.
Why is that bad? 64% of people won’t visit your website again if it’s slow. It’s three times more likely that visitors will leave your website if it takes longer than one second to load.
I also included website speed in my post on the Top 5 Biggest Website Mistakes
Make sure it’s fast!
How do you fix it? First of all, test how fast it is. I really like using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to do this. It’s easy to use, clearly organized, and even tells you what is slowing down your website. Make sure to check both the mobile and computer versions of your websites.
🟩 It’s best to get a score above 90.
🟧 If your score is below that, you need to do some work on your website.
🟥 And if it’s lower than 75, you really need to do some work.
Here are some things to do to speed up your website:
How often: Every 3 months
What is it: Can your website design be improved? Both visually and in regards as to how effective it is to get visitors to buy or sign up. Does it look outdated?
How do you fix it? Gather a few people for feedback on your website. Is there something that could be made easier for visitors on the website? Is there anything that’s confusing or some way to get more people to sign up for your product or service? How can you rethink and improve on it?
Keep your website up to date visually as well. It really won’t help you to have a website that looks like it’s several years old. Things change fast, and you want to look like you’re still in business and on top of things.
Try looking through other website designs and see what you can include on your own site. When I’m searching for inspiration for a design, sometimes I look through Dribble and Behance to look through other designs.
Some articles that might help you out:
How often: Every year
What is it: Is your website and content optimized for SEO? Or in simpler words, will it show up in Google and other search engines?
Why? 90% of all online experiences start with a search engine. You better make sure your website is actually showing up on Google and other search engines!! How often have you used Google to look up something, either to directly buy something, or to look for a helpful or interesting article? You really want to be showing up there!
How do you fix it? There are many things you can do to improve your SEO. Here are some of them:
How often: Every month
What is it: Does your checkout and payment system work well? Is there any way to make it easier to use?
Why? Your checkout and payment system is one of the most important parts of your website if you sell things there. What is the point of having an entire website if people can’t even buy things from there, or it’s very difficult for them to do it?
How do you fix it? Go through your checkout page and see if everything works as it should. Even better, get feedback from your actual clients. Ask them if they encountered any difficulties while buying or booking things from you, if there were any sections that were confusing to them, and whether it is easy and fast to use.
Afterwards, take that feedback and use it to improve your checkout process. Use other websites for inspiration as well. What makes the process easier there and what things did you like about it that you can use?
How often: Every year
I pushed this whole post and then some more through a strainer, until this nice, compact checklist came out.
This is a checklist that you can look through at a glance and use to easily keep track of everything that you need to be keeping track of on your website. Everything that you need to be doing is listed, along with a short explanation and everything is sorted by how often it needs to be done. Download it here:
It’s time for a quick FAQ!
Do you have a bit of spare cash every month? If yes, hire someone. The most important thing to consider is if you’d rather spend hours on doing this every few weeks, and even more hours on learning how to properly do it, or if you’d rather just hire someone else to take care of it for you while you focus on other things.
It really depends. Looks like you’re getting a vague, unsatisfactory answer for this one! But really, it depends very much on who you are hiring, how big your website is, what is included on your website and what you want your maintenance to include.
It can be anywhere from 20 to 2,000 a month. I have even seen a few 10,000+ maintenance packages around, but I think that’s just barmy and a little bit of a rip-off. Beware if you get a price that seems too low to be true as well.
Yes, absolutely. You wouldn’t have as many things to look out for if you don’t regularly post new blog posts, products, or have a payment system but there’s still many things that you have to keep up to date. The majority of the problems that I discover on my own site when I go through it, don’t have anything to do with the blog at all.
Although, maintenance on online shops needs a lot more work, there are also a lot of things to do and look through outside of the products and payment systems.
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Would you like to work with me on your website maintenance? Get in touch with me here, and we can hash out the details or any questions that you might have 🙂
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