Now that we're well into the new year we thought it would be useful to mention a few tasks to help with keeping your website looking great, up-to-date and safe. We’ve put together the below checklist to assist with the upkeep of your website.
* This is a working file, it will be updated often with new & revised information. If you have any suggestions or questions about the information, let us know in the comments section below.
Daily Checklist
- Check your website is working. You can use a plugin or software that monitors your website and notifies you if it’s down
- Run a Backup of your website. Perform a weekly or daily backup of your website files and database, either manually or automate it with a plugin
- Run daily security checks. Use a website security monitoring service to email you a daily report
Weekly/Monthly Checklist
- Visual inspection of your website. Check for any problems with page layout or formatting, and try to use a few different browsers and devices like tablets and phones
- Update. Check for theme, plugins and other software updates, and install the latest versions. Make sure you backup your site before updating incase anything goes wrong
- Check website speed. Use Pingdom to test website speed and fix any issues
- Review website statistics. Log into Google Analytics and review trends, referrals and page-flow. Consider how to use this information to better utilise the traffic coming to your site
- Review SEO Analytics. Tweak title, description tags and page content to re-target keywords
- Fix any broken links. These can be found using Google Webmaster Tools and by inspecting your website
- Write. Publish one blog post OR put time into new content development for your website weekly
- Test. Submit your webforms and make sure they function correctly
- Check your Website Backups. Make sure your backups are working, and can run a restore if/when needed
Yearly Checklist
- Time. Update any time reference (..20 years ago..) and update the copyright in the footer of your website.
- Review. Go through each page on your website and check for consistency (fonts, photo sizes, grammar & text) and make sure the content is still relevant
- Domain Name & Hosting. Review your website Domain Name(s) and expiration, if you don’t renew your Domain or Hosting services your website and email will go down
