How to maintain your website

When your website is maintained continuously, the risk of security breaches, technical errors, and declining visibility is significantly reduced. By continuously updating technology, performance, and content, you ensure that the site remains fast, stable, and relevant for both users who need to convert and search engines that assess whether you deserve a top position.

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Unfortunately, we sometimes see companies invest in new, great-looking websites and then leave them to run on their own. That is a shame, because a website requires ongoing maintenance to minimise the risk of hacking and security breaches, ensure a good user experience, and maintain visibility in Google.

Here you will get an overview of what maintaining your website specifically involves, and how you can improve both operations and performance. If you have a particular focus on B2B, you may also want to read our post on how to improve performance on B2B websites.

Why update? – In short

Your website needs to be kept up to date because the technology around it is constantly changing—when it comes to security, speed, and search engine requirements. If you view maintenance as an ongoing operational task rather than a one-off project, the chances are much higher that the website will continue to support the business instead of getting in its way.

The technical maintenance that keeps your website running

The technical maintenance of your website consists of several parameters. First, you need to ensure that your CMS and your plugins are kept up to date.

In addition, regular security updates are important to reduce the risk of your website being hacked and sensitive personal data being leaked.

We carry out many security updates for our customers, and we always do it on a test server to see whether it breaks anything functionally, visually, or security-wise. If it breaks something or creates security vulnerabilities, we fix the issue by coding on the test site before launching. Once we have coded the fix, we push the update live.

For many companies, the website is built in WordPress, and here security is a discipline in itself. WordPress is one of the world’s most widely used CMSs, and that is precisely why it is also an attractive target for attacks. If you do not want to keep an eye on updates, security vulnerabilities, backups, and test environments yourself, a fixed WordPress support agreement can be a shortcut to peace of mind. Here, a technical team takes responsibility for ongoing maintenance, monitoring, and bug fixing, so you can spend your time on content and business instead of the backend.

Optimise your site speed (or users will leave)

Part of maintaining your website is ensuring that your site loads quickly. This matters both for your website’s ranking on Google and for visitors’ user experience. We all know what it is like to visit a slow website, and often we will leave the page again because we do not want to wait. That is a frustrating way to lose customers.

There are several ways you can optimise the speed of your website, and if you want a very fast website, you should contact a developer.

However, an easy way to improve your website speed yourself is to compress your images so they do not take up too much space. For this, you can, for example, use the tool TinyPNG.

If you want to work even more purposefully with speed, you can download our e-book on speed optimisation. Here we go much deeper than in this section and review six very specific actions you can carry out yourself to make your website or webshop significantly faster:

Download our e-book on speed optimisation here.

Keep an ongoing eye on your SEO

If you do not continuously ensure that you optimise your website for search engines, you risk not getting the most out of it.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and by SEO value I mean the website’s ability to be found on Google.

Instead of writing a long guide here on how you can SEO-optimise your website, I will instead refer you to one of our many other useful blog posts on the topic:

The SEO journey – 18 tips for your search engine optimisation – Complete insight into SEO work (everything from keyword brainstorming and basic optimisation to implementation and maintenance).
How do you write SEO copy? – Here you will get a concrete recipe for copy that both resonates with your readers and makes sense to Google.
On-page SEO definition – Get a clear understanding of what on-page SEO covers, so you can optimise your pages more purposefully.

Keep your website content as up to date as your business

Always ensure that the practical information on your website is up to date, so your visitors find the right information they are looking for.

This could, for example, relate to:

Contact information
Opening hours
Employees
Products/services
etc.

In addition, you should also continuously update your website with new content if, for example, you have a news page or blog. A blog in particular is a great way to increase your website’s SEO value, because you can write blog posts focused on the different keywords you want to be found for. In addition, the blog can “feed” your landing pages by linking back and forth between them, which creates SEO value and guides the visitor through the user journey.

Clean up broken links and avoid digital dead ends

If you run your website through, for example, Morningscore or Screaming Frog, you can get a detailed list of broken links or so-called 404 errors. That is, the links no longer work because, for example, they have been deleted or changed.

As with several of the other points, broken links affect both the page’s SEO value and the user experience. It is frustrating for visitors to click on a dead link, and it stops the user journey abruptly.

Where do you start when everything feels important to maintain?

Now I have mentioned a number of initiatives you can take to maintain your website. But which initiatives should you prioritise in a busy day-to-day, where it can be difficult to get everything done at once?

Here I list the three most important points in order of priority: