You do service your car and floss your teeth regularly. Isn’t it?
In the same way, you also need to maintain your website.
In the absence of regular website maintenance, you may have to face several critical issues such as:
- Broken links (that may cause many web pages to stop working).
- Virus infection (that may damage your website’s reputation).
- Slow loading speed (that may affect the user experience of your website).
- Stale or outdated content (that will affect the trustworthiness of your business).
No individual or business owner can afford to have the above issues on their websites.
Therefore, it’s always recommended to hire a website builder who can help you with your website maintenance, if you don’t have time or technical know-how to do it yourself.
But before you engage a website developer, you need to know some of the essential tasks that your developer must do under the web maintenance contract.
In this blog post, we have shared 6 such important web maintenance tasks that your website builder must do regularly.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Content update
This is the most basic yet essential task that your web builder must do regularly on your website.
You must ensure that all the information on your website is up-to-date so that your visitors don’t lose trust in your business.
Yet there are many websites that have outdated information like old addresses, non-functional phone numbers, obsolete services, etc.
Don’t disappoint your users with outdated information. Whenever there are any changes required, contact your website developer to update your website immediately.
#2 Broken links fixing
A link that shows a “page not found” error on click is a broken link.
When you remove or delete any of the pages on your website, you may forget to update the links that were associated with those deleted pages. As a result, those broken links still exist on your website and when any user clicks on them, they see a page with a “page not found” error (because you already deleted those pages).
But you don’t have to worry about the broken links on your site when you hire a website builder for your web maintenance.
Your developer can check and fix all the broken links on your website regularly.
Broken links on your website affect not only user experience, but it may also affect the SEO score of your website.
#3 Updating plugins or modules
If you have got your website developed recently, chances are that your website developer has used a CMS to build your website. It could be WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or any other CMS platform.
While it’s true that using CMS to build any website can help to reduce the web development cost by almost 40% or more, at the same time every CMS comes with some responsibilities.
Updating the plugins or modules of your CMS platform is perhaps one of the most important responsibilities that your web developer must perform regularly on your website.
Below are some of the consequences of not updating your plugins/modules regularly:
- Website hacking
- Slow loading of webpages
- Website lagging issues
- The entire website or some of its parts may stop working abruptly.
- Red flag on browsers like Chrome when your website gets infected because of outdated plugins.
- Loss of trust among your website users.
Don’t let any of the above issues happen to you. When you hire a website builder, do ensure that updating the plugins should be an integral part of your web maintenance proposal.
#4 Security
The security of any website is as important as its development in the first place. It won’t be wrong to say that before even starting the website development, you or your web developer must have a sound plan for your website’s security.
Lack of security on your website could affect your business in many ways such as:
- Malware attacks
- Loss of search engine rankings
- Low or no sales, in the case of eCommerce websites.
- Website hacking
- Loss of reputation because of a hacked website.
- Loss of confidential data on your website.
- Website blacklisting
Among all the consequences listed above, loss of reputation is the more critical one because once damaged, it may take years for you to get it back.
Therefore, it’s really worth spending some money to hire a website developer in order to maintain your website regularly and avoid all of the security consequences mentioned above.
It’s ok if you don’t have enough budget to hire a local developer because you can hire anytime affordable Indian website builders and save your money.
Recommended post: Why should you secure your WordPress website?
#5 Regular Backups
Even after taking care of all the security norms for your website, you may sometimes face unexpected & unforeseen damage to your website.
This damage could be as serious as server crashes or malware infections which could also eventually lead to loss of data on your website.
To make sure that you never lose valuable data on your website, you need to ensure that you always have the latest & functional backup of your website.
Therefore, when you hire a website builder for your website maintenance, you do need to ensure that your developer agrees to take regular backups of your website. It could be as frequent as weekly or monthly.
The frequency of taking backups should be determined by the nature of your business. For example, if you run an e-commerce store, it’s advisable to back up your website on a weekly or even daily basis so that you don’t lose the customers and order details on your store.
#6 Functional testing
To ensure that your website always works bug-free, you do need to test its functions regularly. However, if you don’t have time to test your website, you can consider hiring a web developer for regular maintenance.
Functional testing may involve:
- Forms testing
- Loading speed testing
- Browser compatibility testing
- Responsiveness testing (mobile-friendliness)
- Ensuring image rendering
- Ensuring email routing
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