You launched your website yesterday. Everything looks great and works perfectly. Job done.
Except it’s not.
Your website needs continuous care to stay secure, fast, and effective. Most small company owners don’t realise this until something goes wrong.
At Marketeam, we help Brisbane businesses protect and maintain their websites by keeping them up-to-date and secure without risking hacks or data loss.
In this guide, we’ll discuss what website maintenance means and why it’s important for small businesses. You’ll also learn how to maintain your website and the most common mistakes to avoid.
Read on to learn what it takes to keep your website safe.
What Is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is the ongoing process of keeping your site secure, fast, and up to date. It’s similar to servicing your car. You wouldn’t drive around Brisbane for years without an oil change, right? Your website needs the same kind of regular attention.
Let’s go over what’s involved in typical website maintenance.
Regular Updates and Security Checks
Your website stays safe when you keep it updated. It’s like locking your door at night to keep trouble out.
Here’s how to stay one step ahead and protect your site:
- Software updates: You need to update plugins, themes, and your Content Management System (CMS) regularly. Every update fixes little bugs and closes security holes that developers found after the last version.
- Security scans: Run regular scans to protect against malware and hackers. It’s important because hackers use automated tools that scan thousands of sites looking for outdated plugins. If you haven’t updated yours in months, you’re an easy target.
- Weakness monitoring: Don’t forget to keep an eye out for vulnerabilities that could compromise your business website. Once you start checking regularly, you’ll catch small issues before they cause disasters.
Let’s be honest, it’s far better to get a warning today than to find out you got hacked last week.
Performance Monitoring and Optimisation
A fast website keeps people happy. But when your site loads slowly, they click away and head straight to your competitors instead.
Consider these approaches to figure out if your site is performing well:
- Speed testing: Check your loading times using performance tools like PageSpeed Insights. If your site takes more than three seconds to load, 53% of visitors will give up and leave. That’s potential customers gone before they even see what you offer.
- Analytics tracking: We recommend inspecting your visitor data to detect problems early. That’s because when you review this information, you can see where people are bouncing off your site and take proper action based on that.
- Device testing: It’s a good idea to check how your site works on phones, tablets, and different browsers. More than half of your visitors browse on mobile, so if your site looks broken on a Samsung or has weird spacing on Safari, you’re losing business without even realising it.
So, the takeaway here is that a site that loads quickly encourages visitors to explore more and come back later.
Why Is Website Maintenance Important for Small Businesses?
Around 60% of small businesses close within six months after a cyber attack. These attacks are primarily automated bots scanning for outdated WordPress plugins on small business sites, like your local café or an accountant’s in Fortitude Valley.
Want to know exactly what happens when you ignore maintenance? Here’s what happens (and it’s not just security; you’ll see soon).
Protection From Security Threats and Downtime
Outdated websites attract hackers who are looking for easy access points into your page. They then hijack your data and destroy everything. However, if you keep backups of your site regularly, you’ll easily prevent these data losses.
We’ve witnessed a small Brisbane retailer that lost eight months of customer orders because they skipped backups. And their recovery bill was more than three years of maintenance expenses combined (ouch!).
So what’s the takeaway? The longer you wait, the bigger the risk. Simple as that.
Better Search Engine Rankings and User Experience
Search engines prioritise well-maintained websites and reward them with higher rankings. But you’re probably wondering how they analyse and select these sites. Well, for example, Google checks your page speed, how it works on mobile, and if you have security certificates.
Besides SEO benefits, fast sites keep their visitors around, while slow ones send them straight to your competitors. Broken links are another thing Google despises. If you have too many missing links, you’ll stop showing up in search results.
Anyway, remember one thing: six months is all it takes for a security breach to completely shut down a business. Don’t take the chance, and properly maintain your website.
Pro tip: Always test your website after every major update or change. Even a small plugin tweak or new feature can break something.
What Should Be On Your Website Maintenance Checklist?
Your website maintenance checklist should include weekly and monthly tasks that keep your site secure and running fast. Most business owners know it’s important (kind of like flossing), but they’re not sure what they’re supposed to be doing or when.
To help you with your regular maintenance procedure, we’ll share some checklists below.
Weekly Maintenance Tasks
Weekly checks are usually quick and shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes, but they catch those problems that cost you a lot of money.
Here are some of the tasks you should perform every week:
- Contact forms: Your form could be broken right now, and you wouldn’t know it. So, check them to avoid losing potential customer enquiries. It might be a simple delayed plugin update or something conflicting, which makes those enquiries stop coming through.
- Broken links: When someone clicks a link and lands on a 404 page, they just leave and assume your business isn’t professional enough. That’s why it must be a high priority to check if you have broken links on your page and fix them.
- Plugin updates: Install the latest updates regularly to fix bugs and patch security vulnerabilities. Outdated plugins or software can contain critical security issues, so applying updates promptly helps protect your site from potential threats.
- Landing pages: Go ahead and test them all, along with your checkout process. Click every button, fill out the forms, and try to purchase from start to finish. It might feel a little silly, but it’s the best way to spot what’s broken.
Regular maintenance shows visitors that you care about quality and proficiency.
Monthly Maintenance Tasks
Monthly checks find deeper problems and keep your site healthy long-term. The more consistent you are with these checks, the less likely you’ll face issues later.
Carry out the following tasks once every month:
- Google Search Console (GSC): Review your GSC data for indexing errors and technical warnings. It tells you exactly what’s wrong with your site from Google’s perspective, like pages not getting indexed, mobile issues, and security problems.
- Visitor data: You need to analyse this data to identify performance drops or unusual activity. When you look at the numbers monthly, you’ll notice patterns emerge. Over time, those patterns help you see what’s working and where you can improve things.
- Website speed: We suggest using tools like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check the site speed. Once you start monitoring it monthly, you’ll identify issues that are slowing down your page. For example, you might find uncompressed images or plugins causing problems.
- Old content: It’s a good practice to refresh your old content to keep your online presence relevant. Like, a blog post from 2022 might still rank well, but if the information is outdated, visitors will bounce immediately.
When you stay on top of things each month, your website keeps growing steadily.
What Are Common Website Maintenance Mistakes?
Now that you know what to do, let’s cover the common mistakes you should avoid while maintaining your website. They include using obsolete plugins, old themes, and having no backup copy of your site data.
Let’s go through the list of these errors and what they do:
- Outdated plugins: Old plugins open small gaps in your site’s security that hackers quickly find. They use bots that scan the internet every day and search for old plugins with easy ways to break in.
- Old themes: They break your site in ways you don’t always notice instantly. For instance, maybe your contact form stops working on mobile, or images start looking weird on tablets. Even worse, sometimes entire pages don’t load properly.
- Delayed updates: If you put off updates for a few months, you’ll feel their impact later. Some people wait a whole year before fixing things, and by then, the damage adds up. Seriously, the repair bill ends up being way higher than the cost of simple monthly care.
- No backups: One hacking instance can wipe out your whole site in seconds when you have no backup. Suddenly, everything is gone, including your menu, online orders, and reviews. You can start over from nothing, but sadly, it takes time, money, and a lot of patience.
- Manual security checks: You’re never going to catch malware by clicking through your site. Rather, automated scans check thousands of files in minutes and spot threats you’d never see on your own.
- Irregular care: Skip maintenance for months, and eventually your site goes down. It results in lost sales, missed enquiries, and frustrated customers.
With a bit of care, your website remains solid and stress-free all year long.
Keep Your Website Healthy With Routine Maintenance
Your website needs regular care to stay safe and run smoothly. When you give it a little attention each month, it keeps working the way you want and delivers visitors a better experience.
In this blog, we’ve covered what website maintenance involves. We’ve also talked about why it’s important for small businesses and why you should perform the maintenance tasks weekly and monthly.
If you’re ready to stop stressing about the tech side of your website, get in touch with us. We at Marketeam take care of the updates and fixes so you can focus on running your business and doing what you love.
