Your website is not a once completed job that you can then forget about. Like a shop front, your website needs on going maintenance and small changes to keep it up to date and to ensure that it is not doing any damage to your business.
Keep The Software Patched
The core of most websites is a Content Management System (CMS) and the plugins, themes and add-ons that sit on top of it. These are updated by the developers of the CMS and individual plugins/themes/add-ons from time to time, typically to fix security holes that are being exploited by criminals. Keeping business software and websites patched is a key message from the National Cyber Security Centre and is relevant even to very simple websites such as 5 page sites. Set a reminder to check for updates on a monthly basis.
Check For Broken Links And Old Pages
Whenever you change something fundamental like a price, service or product name, something else in the website will reference the old information. Go through your own website on a regular basis clicking through all the menu options and checking any links. Old pages that reference products and services that you no longer offer give a bad impression of an uncared for business.
Refresh Content So It Looks Active
The way a search engine views a website is to determine whether it is an active website that has been recently updated or an abandoned website that has been left to gather virtual dust. For this reason, treating your website as ongoing work and continually updating it with new content is crucial to the success of any business, whether a large national brand or small local trades firm. For Web Design Exeter, visit Web design in Exeter by Nettl.
Update Hours, Prices And Offers
A simple check through your opening hours, contact details, prices and special offers on a seasonal basis can help to avoid misleading visitors to your site. Make sure that any references to dates, prices and contact information are up-to-date and correct. This includes ensuring that last year’s Christmas offers are not still advertised on the homepage in March!
Back Up Before Any Change
Before making any updates, ensure you have a full backup of your website and database. Most good web hosting accounts have tools that allow you to create full backups of your websites and databases. It is worth testing these out and ensuring that you can restore a test copy of your website should something go wrong. Once you have updated your plugins, themes and website, test all areas of your website including contact forms, and ensure that online booking systems etc are working correctly. Ideally test your website on a different computer and also on a variety of different devices.
Check How It Looks On Newer Devices
Each year newer devices are launched along with newer software versions for browsers and it is quite common for websites to start to show up with slight irregularities such as random gaps between words, words overlapping each other and on touch devices buttons not being large enough to press. Most of these issues can be identified by viewing a website on a current smart phone and also viewing the website on a current version of the most popular browsers. This is something that Nettl include in their web design for Exeter services.
Watch Page Speed As Content Builds Up
It’s a simple fact – every additional photo, PDF, etc. added to a website increases the load time. A site that loaded in 2 seconds initially can increase to 6-7 seconds or more over time as more content is added. The largest files are typically uncompressed images. These can be reduced in size prior to uploading to the website by reducing the width and saving as a new file – thus not overwriting the original.
Build A Simple Maintenance Habit
Set aside a short amount of time each month to check for updates to plugins and themes, to check for broken links and to check contact details. It’s also worth spending a bit more time each quarter to review the speed of your website, to check how it looks on newer devices and to review the content on your website and to add more where necessary.
A well-maintained website, updated regularly in small doses, does what you need a website to do and then gets out of the way.
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