How to maintain your website

The internet is used for a lot of good, but unfortunately, there are many people who take advantage of vulnerable sites in order to steal data and sometimes even money. There’s quite a good chance such predators will be on the lookout for sites which clearly aren’t maintained as they’re not likely to be programmed with the latest security tools.

Web maintenance will ensure you are all up-to-date with the best combative software, which is now more important than ever, owing to the increasing skill-set many hackers have developed. Even just regular checks of your site could indicate something might be off, in which case, act with immediacy to deter major problems.

One of the major turn offs for visitors would be a website with glaring technical issues. Not being able to enter certain landing pages or being directed into the wrong place will severely affect user experience, and likely hand you less than pleasant bounce rates. It’s therefore vital to check for technical problems and troubleshoot them at the earliest opportunity.

If you have a bespoke website design made on something like WordPress, you may find changes need to be made through complex coding, which can of course be hugely confusing! That’s not always the case though! Sometimes logging into the backend of your site will allow you to complete alterations without too much commotion. There’s also tools available which crawl your site and highlight the issues, most of which often turn out to be simple, five minute jobs.

Keeping your site fresh means you’re moving with the times. The Google chiefs also like to see frequent modifications made, so dormant sites are likely to fall down the pecking order quite rapidly. The obvious areas to focus would be re-writing landing pages, and crafting blog posts every week on subjects that relate to your industry.

Coming across a website which doesn’t look like it’s been touched since 2009 isn’t going to set a very good impression. So, align content with what’s relevant in the modern day, and make sure the manner in which this gets expressed has been done so using methods people would consider contemporary.

You might look at your site and think, what earth were we thinking? If this happens, don’t panic, simply hire web designers in Hertfordshire to help you start all over again. There’s quite a few cases where this would be the best move, because ancient CMS systems aren’t likely to have much scope for major changes.

Formulating a brand new site from the very beginning will allow you to create more consistency with the overall design. Making some changes here and there on an existing site could end up drawing out the older elements more, which means you’re often likely to display a bodge job appearance.

Don’t put off important updates! They may take time and require your site to be down for a while, but they shouldn’t be ignored. At the end of the day, these updates are made to improve the quality of your website, so putting them to one side means you’re not staying ahead of the times.

A website which hasn’t been through necessary updates will stick out like a sore thumb. So, think about the technical modifications that need to be done, but also review the site in general to see whether information currently embedded within content is still factually correct.

Promoting your website is something you always need to keep on top of. This means SEO, and that means looking out for important keywords, creating an effective linking structure and maintaining a suitable loading speed. Leaving sites in the lurch means all these things will be hampered, so not much chance of higher rankings!

The moment you identify problems with SEO, you need to sort this out immediately. Regular input will keep you well placed in the current SERP’s, and that means you’re regularly in with a chance of turning conversions into paying customers! Your SEO marketing efforts will likely take effect a few weeks or even months after changes were made, so sit back and be patient!