Getting your website launched and running is like witnessing your own satellite getting launched into space. After you poured hours of effort into making your website, you might think it’s time to sit back and relax. Like the satellite launching analogy, once the satellite gets into orbit, you’ll need to regularly monitor and maintain its operation. The same thing goes for your website. The website launch and establishing an online presence for your business and brand are not your ultimate goals. Far from that, it’s just the start of your website’s journey. Website management is crucial in your business’s continued operation and growth, which is why you need to make an effective website management plan.
To get your website running effectively and in sync with the progress of your business, it is important to know the ins and outs of managing a website. Let’s take a dive and explore some of these items.
Create a Website Backup Plan
To ensure that your website and its content are regularly accessible, you need to take into account the possible downtime scenarios such as host compromise, cyber-attacks, and other network or server-side issues. Backing up your website ensures that it can bounce back and become operational in no time in a worst-case scenario. Website backup takes a lot of time and memory space, so you need to plan a regular and incremental backup process. Thanks to advances in technology, you can either store your backup in a physical drive or a cloud system. Ensure that the latest backup of your website is regularly stored so that it takes minimal effort to get your site up and running again in case of downtime.
Plan Your Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual Management Tasks
Consistent and regular performance of essential website management tasks ensures that your website is working seamlessly. The tasks can range from reviews, monitoring, audits, and maintenance. Depending on your business process and needs, you can schedule the frequency of performing your regular management tasks on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.
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SEO Audit
Search engine optimization remains an important part of the online marketing strategy in any business and will continue to be so in the future. It is important to run a website audit to regularly maintain a good ranking in Google or any major search engine. This means there should be a scheduled recurring technical audit on various on-site factors of your website, such as site speed, internal links, titles, metadata, and other factors.
Another factor that should be regularly checked in the audit is content quality. It is necessary to keep abreast of the top words that appear in SERPs, to avoid content duplication, and spot low-quality or low keyword count content. Regularly keeping these factors under control helps keep your website rank strongly and consistently among the top pages.
A backlink audit is another important item that should be regularly done. It helps you identify and monitor the top-performing links on your site and keep them optimized. Also, this audit helps you weed out non-performing and bad backlinks that can affect your page rank.
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Review Website Analytics
One regular task that goes well with a scheduled SEO audit is the checking website analytics data. While SEO audit focuses on your website’s on-page optimization, the website analytics gives you the data of the bigger picture – traffic sources of your site visitors, the locations of the visitors, their average engagement time with your site, their search queries, number of clicks, the daily traffic volume and other general, yet essential data. Coordinating your website analytic review and SEO audit allows you to effectively monitor and measure your website’s growth, plan innovative additions to your content, optimize or further improve your high-conversion pages, and revamp or improve those that show low conversion rates.
Check the Website Loading Time
One task you can perform on a monthly basis is checking the load time of your site. Your website can accumulate content over a period of time, and it can take its toll on your database and slow down your site’s load time. Other factors that can affect your website’s loading time are plugin accumulation, media file accumulation, traffic volume spikes, and server performance issues. Having a short and regular interval of loading time checks and maintenance can help you maintain fast loading times and avoid a high rate of page abandonment from website users.
Check Browser and Device Compatibility Performance
The projection of your website should be aimed at a wide-scale rather than on a single track or area. This means that you shouldn’t just limit managing and enhancing your website’s performance on a particular browser (e.g. Google Chrome) or device (e.g. computer). Your site performance management should be done across all browsers and devices. Not all your potential traffic will come from Chrome users or PC users. Significant numbers are coming from Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers, and smartphone and mobile device users. Taking all of them into account can help keep good customer experience and keep a high conversion for your website by being versatile and updated with the latest versions of browsers and devices.
Customer Experience Management
Never forget to take into account the customers and users of your website when it comes to its management. Your customers and site users are the ones that keep your business up and running, so create your management plan with your customer’s experience in mind. Work on how to handle both positive and negative situations effectively so that you can keep your customers satisfied and become loyal users of your site.
Keep your website engaging and encourage reviews, comments, and suggestions. Incorporate social media links where they can interact with your business account and provide helpful reviews, feedback, and comments. Make it a point to monitor these interactions and regularly respond to them. Not all reviews you receive may be positive, but responding to negative reviews in a constructive and timely manner will still make a positive impact on customers, as it makes them feel that they and their opinions are appreciated.
Being creative and proactive with your website downtime or maintenance messages also helps maintain your customer base. Place humorous images and lines to lessen the frustration and annoyance of reaching a non-functional page on your site. Also, be sure to suggest links or alternative resources that your customers may find useful and set a realistic and achievable expectation and timeframe on when your page will become available again.
Website management is a dynamic task that should come hand-in-hand with your business operation. Once you know which tasks are needed and how often you should perform them, you can make an effective and flexible website management plan. You can adjust and make changes to your website management plan at any time to keep your website running smoothly and performing optimally as it grows with your business.
