Do you remember the first time you had designed your website? You probably had a meeting with your sales team, your production team and your design team. So much of enthusiasm around!
Now that your business has grown, do you still have that same enthusiasm when you visit your website? Or you feel that you are missing out on something?
Websites are an integral component in your Marketing strategy. It is always important that you do a proactive website maintenance and ensure it is kept fresh always.
Below are some basic tips for a Proactive Website Maintenance:
If you own a website then you should:
- Update your website as regular as once a week
- Refresh your website/database backups regularly
- Have a blog about your business and update that regularly
- Always analyse your website and check if it fits your current Marketing strategy
- Check if all your forms – contact, feedback, registration, login etc., are all working
- Check for broken links, JavaScript and 404 errors
- Ensure SEO best practices are used
- Check for browser compatibility across all browsers
- Check for website responsiveness to different devices
- Monitor comments on your blog and get rid of negative comments.
Now, if you are a blogger then:
- Keep adding fresh contents
- Always check for broken links
- Check if your meta content is correct
- Verify blog tags
If you’re an image artist (digital artist, photographer or a videographer) then:
- Update images regularly and do away with those that are not useful
- Optimize images and reduce the load time
- Ensure alt tags are in place
If you run an ecommerce website:
- Check categories, listing and product pricing
- Run seasonal specials, promotions and/or coupons
- Optimise images for fast load time
- Check for responsiveness of the pages
- Check all forms, login and payment procedures
- Ensure proper SEO best practices
- Monitor comments; clean up negative feedback and get rid of any spam
Proactive Website Maintenance keeps your Marketing Team happy and also the Search Engines!
Regular and proactive website maintenance ensures a fresh look to your website. This would be appreciated by your visitors, who will show their loyalty over a period of time.
Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing give better weightage to those websites that are maintained regularly and proactively. Your website is more likely to appear in a search if you keep your content relevant and up-to-date.
In house Website Maintenance or Outsource Website Maintenance, the debate is still relevant!
In this competitive world, where you are having your hands full to run your business, where do you have the time for updating the website yourself?
What next? Outsource? This debate would go on.
Whether it is doing website maintenance on your own or you have outsourced your website maintenance – proactive website maintenance is critical to your website’s success.
