Website Maintenance & Items You Should Check Monthly

It is essential in this digital day and age to have some sort of online presence for your business. Did you know that maintaining your website is just as important? We aren’t talking about just big changes like when you move in a different direction or rebrands itself with a whole new image. Even simple things can make a huge difference to online visitors and your business. Below we list the items you need to stay on top of when maintaining your website.

Contact Information and Forms

Your potential customers or clients won’t be able to get in touch with you if they don’t have the tools to do so. This is why you want your contact information to be the first thing that is visible on your landing page or easily accessible without a lot of searching.

Something else you need to check is any contact forms on your website. There could be a technical glitch, a bad email address attached for leads to send to, or any number of reasons that they may not function properly so questions, concerns or requests can be handled.

Promotional Offers and Deals

If there is one thing that annoys someone is finding a coupon or promotion and discovering they are too late and it has expired. If you offer deals or special that require a coupon be sure to update them often so they are valid. When people see outdated coupons and promotions, they get the impression your website is neglected and that is not the impression you want to make to customers. Simply by doing regular updating and changing promotions and coupons you give your visitors a reason to keep coming back and that is exciting for your business.

Image Errors and Broken Links

If your website has URL’s, external and internal link paths that have broken links and images that don’t display on your website, search engines will panelize you. Search engines takes those sorts of things into consideration as a ranking factor. Checking links on your website is something you should be doing monthly. Go through your site and make sure images are displaying correctly and that any links on your site take you to the appropriate page. While this may take some time for website that are larger and more complex, it is very much worth the time and effort and your website will be rewarded for it in the rankings.

Site Loading Speed

There is another maintenance thing you should keep on top of because it can significantly impact your ranking and more importantly conversion rates, is the speed at which your website loads. We live in a world where we want everything now. Statistics have shown that 40% of visitors to a website will leave it if takes more than 3 seconds to load. When designing & developing your website, this should be kept in mind. Even in established website as they go changes and pages are added or removed, that can impact the loading speed. By checking your website’s load times regularly, you won’t be losing business from slow loading speeds.

Your Website’s Blog

If your website doesn’t have a blog that might be something you may want to start. Surveys show that businesses with a blog often receive 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links just from having a blog. One of the most important aspects of a blog is making sure to keep it active and updated. Just like other items we mentioned, if a visitor sees outdated content, they get the impression that your website is also neglected and that is not an impression you want to give. Make it a habit to update your blog post with news products, and events related to your business. The bonus of this content is that you can share it across your social media platforms.

By keeping your website maintained, visitors to your site will be better informed and they will have more reason to give you their business.

Paul Albee is the digital marketing director of ATS Design Group in Syracuse, New York. Paul and his team specialize in all aspects of online digital marketing for the construction trades including Web Design Syracuse, SEO search engine optimization, and eCommerce design and development.