You've just invested countless hours, dollars, and late nights into your website project. Everything is looking and working just right, and now you can stop thinking about it until the next time you redesign in five (or more) years...right? It may be disappointing to hear, but websites are far from “set-it-and-forget-it.” Even brochure sites require regular maintenance to avoid big, costly, urgent problems in the future.
If you're feeling in the dark on the regular tune-ups your website needs, we got you! Here are the four, bare-minimum things you should be executing monthly as a website owner.
Update Software
Depending on your platform, the software components of your website may or may not stay up-to-date automatically. Moreover, they may not remain compatible with each other and your hosting environment when they do receive updates. Make sure you don't neglect regularly checking for available updates to your CMS, plugins, and server software like PHP. If you're on a platform that performs updates automatically, keep an eye out for notices of major upcoming releases, like a bump from WordPress v5 to v6, or PHP v7 to v8. We usually recommend performing these bigger updates manually in a safe, staging environment, before deploying to production.
Confirm Backups Are In Place
Here's something that takes less than five minutes, but could be a life-saver. While many hosting platforms have backups baked into their plans, many offer this service only as an add-on. If you're on one such host, or you use a third-party service for backups, take a moment to regularly double check automated backups are still running and aren't about to expire. It's been said, “a backup isn't real unless it's tested,” so bonus points if you go the extra mile to confirm your restore system is working.
Review Uptime Report
Hopefully you're already using a monitoring service like Uptime Robot. These services keep a constant eye on your site and let you know right away if there are problems. Outside the day-to-day notifications, spend a few minutes monthly to review your site’s uptime/downtime percentage, so you know whether your site and web host are performing as well as you need them to.
Perform a QA Check
We think it's smart to mindfully browse your website regularly, keeping a particular eye out for browser console errors, display issues, and broken links. Visit your site on multiple browsers and devices too, since differences between these can be drastic. Fortunately, if you have a large website, there are ways to automate QA checks — though it's also wise to look things over for problems with content that require human evaluation.
Of course, there comes a time in the life of every site when a website overhaul is needed. But, with a handle on how to perform regular maintenance on your website, you can rest much easier, knowing you'll get the maximum life out of it. And whether you need help with maintenance or a rebuild, we’re here to help!
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