For many new businesses, a website is one of the biggest investments they make, either in time to create it themselves or investing in a professional to do it for you.And while your website will probably run fine without your intervention most of the time, occaisionally things can go wrong. Taking just 10 minutes each month to check over your site and make sure it is working for your visitors is a really great investment of your time.
I’ve created a free checklist you can download to work through each month to ensure that you are covering all the basic steps to make sure that things are still working nicely.
What do you need to do?
Backups and Updates
Those of you who used a website all in one service like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace can sit back at this point as backups and updates are not necessary on these platforms. The hosts do them for you and you just have to hope they get it right!
Before you do anything make sure you have a recent backup or run one, then check for updates and update anything that needs attention.
WordPress has a bad name for security with some people thinking it is not secure. In reality the sites that tend to get hacked are the ones that have not been updated regularly, making it easy for hackers to attack vulnerabilities in old versions of the software so this is really important! You can find out more about backing up your site on this blog.
Test your forms
Ensuring people can easily contact you is vital. While a contact form should work reliably it takes 2 minutes to check so send yourself a message from your contact forms.
Also sign up to your email lists to check that is all working nicely too (make sure your lists are set to allow you to sign up multiple times for a better user experience)
Check Your Analytics
Do you know how many people are visiting your site each month? While you are in the site take a look at your analytics to see whether you have any unexpected peaks or troughs so you can get a better idea of what is and isn’t working.
Check for broken links
Dead links are annoying for customers so use this nifty checker to make sure your site doesn’t have any.
Wouldn’t this be so much easier if there was checklist I hear you cry?! Why yes I have made one for you and you can get it below. Just print off a copy and work through the list to get your website up to date
