Once your website is up and running, you may think all the hard work is done. In reality, though, a website’s progress is never truly complete.
Even the most carefully crafted website is bound to have a few issues, and the longer your site goes without a maintenance check, the more your problems will increase. When performing regular website analysis, you must be on the lookout for an assortment of potential issues:
Function
You’ve designed a great website with eye-catching design and valuable content. Surely leads will come flying in now, right? Not necessarily. If your site isn’t set up correctly, those leads will be lost in limbo.
We recommend you test the following elements at least once a month:
- Forms and buttons. Make sure every button leads precisely where it should, and that all forms are sent to the appropriate parties so you can follow up promptly.
- Site speed. Certain plugins and graphics cause pages to load slowly, which has a significant impact on bounce rates. Visitors are likely to abandon your site if it takes too long to load.
- Links. Broken links will not only ruin UX, but they also look unprofessional. Make sure all links are working, and apply redirects to avoid visitors unexpectedly landing on a 404 page.
Security
Every website is at risk for hacking. To keep your site safe, you’ll need to install the latest updates for your web host and plugins on a consistent basis. Without security updates, you’re left vulnerable to unauthorized parties accessing your private data. Web hosts commonly make bug fixes known when they release a new update, which means hackers know exactly what parts of an out-of-date site to target.
Your specific web host isn’t the only place you’ll need to watch for security updates, however. Popular browsers also go through privacy updates to confirm user safety, like Google Chrome’s recent in-browser security alerts. Ignoring universal online updates is a major red flag.
SEO
There’s no point in crafting an excellent website if nobody can find it. Enter SEO. To gain a good search engine results page (SERP) ranking, you’ll need to optimize your entire site. SEO is incredibly complex, and there’s far more to achieving success than using the right keywords.
Search engines take many small details of your site into account when deciding your ranking, such as:
- Meta descriptions
- H1 tags
- Image alt tags
- URLs
- Backlinks
And remember: just because a tactic worked two months ago doesn’t mean it will help your on-page optimization today. With Google’s constantly changing algorithm, regularly testing out methods and updating your SEO strategy is a must.
Ongoing website maintenance is essential to get the most out of your investment and enhance its performance. Here at HeadsUp, we offer website maintenance packages and would be happy to discuss how your site can help increase your ROI. Contact us today!