Picture yourself driving along a dry, desolate stretch of highway through the desert. Sun blazing down unmercifully. Heat rising up from the blacktop. Nothing for miles.
Suddenly, the check engine light blinks on. You get a little nervous. “I’m sure it’s no big deal,” you tell yourself. You glance at the peeling oil change sticker on the windshield. Next oil change due 22,100 miles. You look at the odometer. 73,212. “That can’t be right. Car’s been running fine.”
Boom! Black smoke! Screeching halt! Your heart sinks. Guess what? Those missed $49 oil changes just became a new $6,000 engine.
Hope you have sunscreen. And reception.
Like the idea a car just continues to run along, maybe you’re the type that thinks you put up a website and you’re done. It will just kerchunk along like a little money-making machine converting visitors into sales.
Oh, if only it worked that way.
Unfortunately, Jack and Jill, like those who don’t maintain their car with regular maintenance, the wake-up call on not maintaining a website usually involves something catastrophic like the site going down or a nosedive in rankings.
And unlike a check engine light, there is no website warning light to notify you your site needs help.
You can prevent this scenario with simple steps.
Website maintenance on a regular basis will keep your customers happy, the search engines happy and you happy.
Here are 7 things you should on a regular basis to keep your site humming along:
Set a schedule (and stick to it)
Setting a schedule helps keep you on top of things. Not all these things will need to be done every day, but giving each of these a set time to do makes it more tangible and less likely to be forgotten. For example, every Monday I update all my WordPress site plugins and themes.
Site Backups
Do I even have to tell you to do this? 80% of small and medium-sized businesses have experienced website downtime. For an e-commerce site, downtime = lost $$$.
While hosting platforms and e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify routinely have backups of the server your site is running on, you are responsible for backing up your current data – which means products, pricing, blog articles.
For WordPress, get a backup plugin and schedule automatic backups. How often to backup depends. If things change daily on your site (like new sales daily, or daily blog articles) then a nightly backup would be warranted. If your site changes weekly, then schedule a weekly backup.
Broken Links
Broken links can cover a few scenarios; external links to other sites, backlinks to your site, internal links to other pages on your site, 404 pages, menu items.
Broken links are mainly annoying to your customers. They give people coming to your website the impression that your site is not up to date.
Broken links can negatively affect your SEO, but usually not hugely unless they pile up. But every little bit matters. Broken outbound links will send negative signals to Google about your website authority, which does affect SEO.
404 pages.
I’m sure you’ve seen these. It’s what happens when a page isn’t found and you’re presented with some goofy message like “Oops, somethings wrong here” (Thanks Captain Obvious). 404’s can be caused by a URL change, broken links, a removed page with no redirect, or sometimes a server glitch. Any URL change should include a 301 (permanent change) or 302 (temporary change) redirect. If possible, better to update a page than remove it, though if you do have to remove it, a 301 to a similar page should be done (i.e. a product is discontinued so you redirect to a similar product.)
Here are some handy tools to check links on your site (all are free):
- Check your site for broken links here: https://ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker
- Check backlinks with this backlink checker: https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
- Google Search Console Coverage Report: https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome
(you need a google account to access this last one)
Outdated Blog Articles
Not long ago I had a search result show up that said “5 SEO Tactics You Should be Doing Right Now”. Turns out the article was from 2008. Three out of the 5 tactics listed would no longer help you with SEO.
You should be checking old blog articles for relevance, links, outdated facts. You don’t have to rewrite it, but a freshening up will not only keep it relevant, but someone coming to your site for the first time won’t get the impression this site is outdated.
Old Product Photos
This mainly pertains to e-commerce sites. Do a cursory look at Amazon reviews and you will see quite a few negative reviews that the product they received didn’t look like the picture. Not that the product is wrong per se, but it wasn’t what they were expecting.
If you don’t already know this, fulfilling customer expectations are vital to a positive customer experience.
Keeping old photos of products just makes you look like you’re out of date, especially if your competitors are keeping up to date. People shop around. Old crappy photo on your site, new shiny detailed photo on another site, guess where they’re going. Many manufacturers have product photos on their sites for you to download and use. If they don’t, they aren’t helping themselves, are they? Break out the camera.
Plugins and Themes
This relates mainly to free versions of plugins and themes. Because on platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and WordPress, premium plugins for the most part do automatic updates.
Not keeping plugins up to date on WordPress can literally be devastating to your website. Hackers work like Santa’s little elves to exploit flaws in plugins and themes. If you are using WooCommerce on your WordPress site, you absolutely owe it to yourself and your company to keep up on this.
Here is where a site manager like ManageWP can be handy. (no, I get no reimbursement for this product) It can make website maintenance much easier. There are others, but I like this one. You can manage single or multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard. It makes it easy to update plugins and themes and includes free monthly backups.
And it is free for unlimited sites.
They make their money on premiums. I have 6 sites on MangeWP and every Monday I check for updates.
Copyright
This is one most people never think of.
For me, an outdated copyright on a site such as “Copyright 2015-2018” instills thoughts of “Are still around? Are they out of business? Have they not updated their site in 5 years? Or did they just forget to update it?” This is a simple fix and a no-brainer that tells visitors you are current.
Here is a real example.
The other day I was searching online for a snack I would buy locally but is no longer carried. I went to the company website listed on the package. Similar to the above, the copyright date was 2019. Blog articles were old, there was a store, but it was missing photos and links didn’t work. Made me wonder if the product was no longer being made. So, I sent an email through contact us.
Here is the response I received: “Oh, that’s our old website. Here’s a link to our new website.”
I could write an entire article on all the things wrong with this but let me just point out when I did a cursory search that their old website is ranking better than their new one!
Don’t wait until something bad happens to start doing website maintenance.
Maintaining your website is vital if you want to keep search engines happy – particularly Google. If Google crawls your site and keeps seeing the same old same old or broken links adding up, it will eventually figure the site is no longer relevant and drop its ranking.
But more importantly, keeping your website maintained makes for a better customer experience. Ultimately, they are the ones making the decision to subscribe to or buy from you and the ones you need to keep happy.
