It’s Monday again and thought I could outline some tasks you need to do monthly in relation to maintenance of your website:

Keep checking in on Google/Bing Webmasters Tools

If you are handling your website yourself than at some point you learned or were shown Google and Bing webmasters tools so that you can submit your sitemap to Google and Bing. Well, this needs to be checked monthly in case Google/Bing detects an issue with your website which doesn’t allow their crawlers/bots to visit your website, ergo no more indexing of your website.

Check Google Analytics

Same goes for Google Analytics as for Google Webmasters Tools. You need to check on analytics so that you can gauge where you visitors are coming from and how they reach your website. Based on the analysis of the data you might need to change or update the content depending on the audience you want to target. You might even find that making your site multilingual based on the traffic you receive to be beneficial.

Do Backups

Whether you have a simple html website, or you are using a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla you need to make monthly or even daily backups of your website. It is reasonable to assume that at some point your site might be hacked or you might just go in to edit something and make a simple mistake without the ability to revert to a previous version of the file. Make backups to save you from headaches.

Do updates

This task mostly applies to Content Management Systems which have extensions or modules created be the CMS creators or even third-party developers. Like any ordinary software, Content Management Systems and their extensions will in time have bugs. These bugs may just effect functionality or they can create security issues that may lead to more severe problems like leaked personal data or a broken website due to a hack.

Make sure that all your links work

Plain and simple, when people click on a link they expect to find the content they are looking for. Whether they click a search result or a link directly on your site they will be annoyed if they find 404 pages or broken links in general. It makes it look like you aren’t taking care of your website if things are broken or outdated.

Check That Contact Forms Work

Finally, if people can’t get in touch with you leads to you losing business.

If these tasks seem daunting, get someone to handle them for you. By someone I mean an actual professional. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at info@georgenicolaou.me