The Busy Website Owner’s Guide to Website Maintenance

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Having a website can feel like an exciting project, but sometimes it can be overwhelming to manage all the technical stuff. An effective website maintenance strategy allows you continue engaging your audience and achieving your business goals without stressing yourself out.

Without regular upkeep, your site’s performance can deteriorate over time. Pages may load slower, search engine rankings can drop, broken links multiply, and new content stops attracting visitors.

Plus, it leaves your site vulnerable to hacking. Just like your car or home, your website needs regular tune-ups and improvements to keep everything running smoothly.

The good news is that you don’t need fancy technical skills to keep your site in shape. By dedicating a little time each day, week, and month to essential website tasks, you can keep your site optimized for your visitors and priorities.

Below, I’ll outline key website maintenance tasks that all website owners should aim to complete on a regular basis. We’ll review quick daily checkups, weekly website health reviews, and bigger monthly updates. These tips will help you form healthy website habits that don’t require a ton of technical expertise.

By following this busy website owner’s guide to regular maintenance, you can avoid the common pitfalls of neglected websites and ensure your site continues effectively growing your business or brand over the long haul.

Daily Website Maintenance

Taking just a few minutes each day to check on your website’s health can go a long way in preventing or catching issues early. There’s nothing worse than realizing your site’s been down for the last day and you didn’t even notice. Here are the key tasks worth adding to your daily website maintenance routine.

Review Website Uptime

First, check that your website is actually up and running. You can view the website on both desktop and mobile, or use a monitoring service like UptimeRobot. I’m all for automating as much as I can, so I love UptimeRobot! It’s a free service that checks your site on a regular, pre-determined basis and alerts you right away if your site is down.

Configuring automatic pings to alert you anytime your homepage fails to load gives you peace of mind. If your site does go down for any reason, knowing of the outage right away helps get things back online more quickly.

Quick Glance at Analytics

Next, log into Google Analytics to review key metrics for any worrying changes. Take a look at traffic acquisition reports and watch for sudden surges or drops in organic traffic in particular that could signal problems. Spending just a few minutes familiarizing yourself with recent trends can help you spot emerging issues while they are still small and manageable.

Handling Website Backups (or Setting Them To Be Automated!)

Finally, backup your website’s content daily. Don’t put this off assuming your host will handle it. Using automated backup plugins like UpdraftPlus makes regular cloud backups super easy. I set mine to backup daily and store to my Google Drive.

There’s been situations where website hosts themselves got hacked or had technical errors and websites hosted with them lost all content and backups. If disaster ever strikes your site through hacking or corruption, you’ll be immensely relieved to have recent backups saved in your own Google Drive ready to restore with just a few simple clicks.

Pro tip: Create a fresh backup before updating any plugins, themes, or core WordPress files. It’ll give you a restore point to roll back to in case one of the updates causes issues that break your site.

Making these few website health checks part of your daily maintenance routine takes little time but provides immense peace of mind.

Promote Content on Social Media

Sharing your new posts and other content on social platforms helps drive traffic and engagement. But manual posting can be tedious and time-consuming. Using a social media scheduler like SmarterQueue allows you to easily plan and schedule content promotion across platforms like Facebook, Twitter (X), LinkedIn, and more.

SmarterQueue’s scheduler is amazing for evergreen content. I currently have my scheduler set up to post articles, tips on buying, selling, and growing niche sites, and helpful graphics a set amount of times a week.

They can be set to recycle the content over time. My goal is I create new content, I add it to the top of the queue so it gets seen. That pushes older content to recycle about once every 8-12 months, allowing it to be seen by new followers and fresh eyes that missed it the first time around.

Scheduling saves time, grows your reach, and even provides personalized analytics to refine efforts over time. Social automation tools are a smart time-saver that help maintain work/life balance while keeping your content and brand top of mind.

Weekly Website Maintenance

While a few quick daily checkups catch small issues, you should also schedule time every week for an in-depth review and tuneup of your website. Consistently making time for these deeper tasks will keep your site optimized and growing over the long run.

Perform an In-Depth Analytics Review

Checking in on key analytics reports weekly helps you identify new trends and issues needing attention. Set aside time each week to log into Google Analytics or your chosen platform and scrutinize data with a bigger picture perspective.

Watch for overall website traffic trends. If visitors or organic growth has stalled, you may need to adjust your content and outreach strategy. Check if visitor demographics have shifted and optimize content accordingly if needed.

Pay close attention to your top landing pages and exit pages. Make updates to poor performing pages to reduce exits and boost conversions. Compare recent traffic and engagement to your overall goals, and make strategic tweaks if you find yourself off track.

Research Target Keywords and SEO Optimization

As search engine algorithms and trends evolve over time, so should your SEO strategy. Dedicate time each week to researching new relevant keywords to target, and create content based around those keywords.

Also use this time to improve page speed, internal linking, meta descriptions, image optimization, and other technical SEO elements that boost rankings. Expanding backlink building to core pages and keywords should become a weekly habit as well.

Publish New Content

Consistently publishing quality articles each week provides exponential benefits related to SEO, branding, and audience. Set time aside to create useful, engaging posts that provide value and build loyalty.

Optimize each post for SEO by incorporating target keywords in headings, URLs, meta descriptions, and content. The compounding effects of regular content creation will grow your site’s organic traffic and authority over time.

Review User Feedback and Site Issues

Stay tuned into your audience by checking reviews, comments, emails, and other feedback channels each week for visitor sentiments and site issues. Make it a habit to browse and compile recent user feedback, taking note of any recurring issues or complaints.

Prioritize fixing broken pages, links, images, or other errors that frustrate users. Look for opportunities to improve site speed, navigation, page content, and the overall user experience based on what you learn. Monitoring user feedback weekly helps you view your site through your audience’s eyes.

Run a Broken Link Check Scan

Over time, websites can accumulate broken links either from removed pages or changes made to linked resources. Each week, use a tool like the Broken Link Checker (it’s FREE!) to crawl your site and identify any broken links.

Fixing broken links improves user experience and also helps with eliminating SEO crawl errors. Make broken link checks weekly practice to limit frustrations for visitors and avoid losing rankings.

Plus, doing it weekly makes it easier to manage, as opposed to waiting and then finding out you have 20 broken links to sort through and fix!

Check Monetization Performance

If your website earns revenue through streams like advertising, affiliates, memberships, or other monetization sources, spend time each week reviewing their performance. Look for opportunities to increase revenue by joining new affiliate programs, creating new paid offerings, or adding another revenue stream.

Monthly Website Maintenance

While daily and weekly tasks keep your site tuned up, it’s wise to invest time each month into deeper maintenance for long-term health. Set aside a few hours to focus on these bigger picture items.

Audit Site Speed and Performance

Site speed is a crucial factor in search engine rankings and visitor experience. Each month, do a comprehensive audit using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Website Speed Test. Check page loading times, analyze site architecture issues, identify slow plugins/themes, and review hosting performance.

Make speed optimization an ongoing process. For WordPress sites, caching plugins like WP Rocket can dramatically improve load times. Always look for ways to help pages load faster.

Update Old Content and Media

Over time your content can become outdated, irrelevant and less useful to readers. Spend time each month auditing old blog posts, pages, videos, etc. Update outdated facts, statistics, broken media links, and references.

Refresh stale content to make it timely and valuable again. This improves reader experience and re-engages return visitors.

Monitor Google Search Console

Regularly check Google Search Console for critical insights. Review index status to ensure all new content is being crawled efficiently. Check for any manual actions needed to resolve issues. Optimize content based on enhancement opportunities and diagnostics.

Track Keyword Rankings

Use Google’s organic keyword position tracking in Google Search Console to see where you currently rank for relevant terms and discover new keywords to target. Comparing rankings month-to-month shows SEO progress.

Optimize Site Architecture

Eliminate shallow content, fix broken pages, and strengthen internal linking structure each month. Well-organized information architecture with linked context improves crawling and rankings.

Review Backlink Profile

Use free tools like Moz Link Explorer to audit backlink quantity, quality, and authority. Disavow any sketchy links. Seek new high-value backlinks from reputable sites monthly.

Review Goals and Make Strategic Adjustments

Each month, revisit your key website goals and metrics. Review analytics to determine if you are moving the needles on traffic, leads, sales etc. If progress has stalled, it may be time for strategic shifts.

Brainstorm and test changes to design, content, advertising, email marketing and other areas to get back on track.

Staying on top of regular website maintenance may feel like a chore, but it pays off majorly in the long run. By dedicating a little time each day, week, and month to essential maintenance, you can keep your site running smoothly, engaging visitors, and accomplishing your online goals.

Quick daily checkups catch small issues before they become big ones. Weekly maintenance like publishing fresh content and monitoring analytics allows making timely strategic adjustments. And monthly audits enable you to fine-tune website performance and capitalize on new opportunities.

Following this busy website owner’s guide to regular non-technical maintenance provides a roadmap to protect your website and maximize your growth!