Your website needs regular maintenance. Perspective sharing is important, so let’s draw perspective: every piece of software in the world needs to be maintained. From your car to your smartphone, your air conditioning unit, or your water pump – if it has tech… it needs to be maintained.
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Consider: Companies with million-dollar budgets for their software departments crash, move slowly, advertise they’re “undergoing maintenance” or go offline at some point.
If you might be expecting or looking for a once-working, always-working website experience, your website will disappoint you.
Setups that worked at launch, in year 1 may not always work or can change since software is constantly evolving.
Plugins, themes and codes which once worked like clockwork can suddenly become incompatible. This is the headache of software, and one we save you from with an active maintenance plan.
Website Maintenance
Defined, it is the actions of regularly checking your website for issues and keeping it updated and relevant. It should be completed on a consistent basis to keep your website healthy which encourages continued traffic and strengthened SEO/Google ranking, return visitors and good performance.
There are important steps to be undertaken to have your website running smoothly. The most important are website security, theme and plugin updates. Without these your website has the potential to be a danger to any who visit your site (or worst, stop running properly or altogether).
These are a list of maintenance tasks that should be completed Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly.
Weekly maintenance activities
- Complete backup.
- Website loading without errors
- Update software and plugins
- Check that forms /links are working properly
- Amend broken links
- Monitor comments (for spam or responses)
- Write new blogs to keep your client updated and encourage SEO traffic
Monthly maintenance activities
- Speed optimization
- Full security scans
- Update blogs with relevant / updated details.
- Renew hosting and website elements
Quarterly maintenance activities
- Thorough assessment of images, videos and content, whether anything should be updated
- Review meta titles and descriptions, are they relatable and effective?
- Check responsiveness on all devices of your site
- Restore a previous version of website to check your backup health
Yearly maintenance activities
- Check each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos and relevancy
- Renew domain, hosting, maintenance plans
- Review your top performing blogs, are they still relevant ?
- Assess your website design and layout – are they still relevant?
If your website has not been maintained (with sufficient reports) for at least 2 months, your website must be audited before it can be addressed under a cariCare plan.
NB: A website audit does not FIX your website, it is an assessment of the work to be done. If your website requires extensive work to be managed, you will be invoiced separately under a remediation plan. After your website (issues) have been audited and remediated, your website is now ready for a regular monthly maintenance plan.
If your website requires nominal work, this can be performed under a one of our cariCare plans.
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