Jump On In: Diving Deep into Website Maintenance

When we think of website maintenance, a few things come to mind: bug fixes, content updates, security patches and software updates. While website maintenance does include these actions, it is not simply a small checklist you can run through every now and again. When performed regularly and properly, website maintenance can be a full-time job.

Websites serve as a critical part of your brand, allowing customers access to you 24/7. Your website acts as a digital storefront, one-stop-service shop, resource station, and customer service communication base while providing credibility and legitimizing your company. User expectations and experience have changed dramatically within the last few years, making website maintenance an imperative aspect of keeping your business healthy.

Without maintenance, websites risk looking outdated or neglected, failing to load pages and encouraging your customers to seek help elsewhere while also becoming susceptible to security breaches, which can negatively impact your band’s reputation and overall success.

What Should Website Maintenance Include?

At the base level, website maintenance should always include a variety of touchpoints. Modern websites, even the simplest, come with unique complexities and sensitive data that must remain secure. Website maintenance can include but is not limited to:

• Security Updates, Scans & Patches. The digital world is filled with security threats, but regularly monitoring and addressing security gaps can better protect your website from sensitive data breaches and crashes. At a baseline, your website should receive security updates monthly.
• Software Updates. Website software evolves year after year, becoming faster, smoother and more adaptable to the latest trends. Keeping up with software updates ensures your website not only looks great but functions as intended without any hiccups. Software, including languages and libraries that run website infrastructure, require frequent updates, which can leave your website broken or vulnerable. The same goes for updating dependencies like libraries that are used to add additional functionality to the website. Therefore, it is crucial to keep software up to date and ensure it is compatible with every version upgrade.
• Content Updates. Regularly updated content is one of the most significant contributors to driving user engagement and building relationships with your audience. Outdated content or content that has not been touched in a while can impact a user’s trust and understanding of your products and services. Similarly, listing new items and meeting market demand are vital to stay ahead of the competition.
• Backup and Disaster Recovery. Important and valuable data can get lost on your website without routine backup and recovery efforts. That is why it is so important to have a disaster recovery plan in place to save this information, which can include user accounts, customer data, sales figures, source code and more.
• Performance Monitoring & Optimization. When it comes to the overall technical performance of your website, things like page load times, file sizes, mobile vs. desktop performance and more come into play. As a standard guide, we use Google’s Lighthouse requirements to indicate and determine website performance, as well as standards set by W3C. These ensure we are following the latest requirements, standards and guidelines to keep our client’s websites performing well day after day.
• Accessibility Testing and Compliance. While the world of website accessibility and compliance can take up an entire blog in and of itself, we optimize at the WCAG level A.A. and base any additional accessibility requirements on our client’s specific needs. When any new content or change is made on a website, accessibility comes into play, making it a necessary step of regular website maintenance.
• SEO Updates. Without regular SEO updates, your website can quickly fall down the search engine chain and fail to meet the latest requirements. SEO and website health go hand in hand; otherwise, your website’s ranking and visibility can decrease. Like many steps listed here, SEO updates are a core part of website maintenance to ensure the site follows the latest requirements and standards so that any new products and services are properly listed and promoted over time.
• Website Analytics Monitoring. Monitoring website analytics allows us to understand how the website performs over time, identify key areas that could be improved and help you make better data-driven decisions for your business. For example, with routine website maintenance, we could review analytics to see how the latest marketing campaign is performing, where and when customers tend to drop off the site and where the most traffic routinely comes from.
• Usability Testing. During usability testing, we seek out how users interact with your website, helping to identify any areas for improvement. This ensures a smoother and more user-friendly experience for your website, especially as you add new content and make key updates.
• Quality Assurance. Quality assurance or QA testing is one of the most important elements of website maintenance. We QA multiple areas of a website, including cross-browser testing, load testing, manual testing and regression testing.

Preparing to Launch

Performing website maintenance requires a thorough release process to ensure any changes made during maintenance will function as intended. We follow the best practices and latest requirements that the largest corporations follow when maintaining web code and properly deploying installations.

Our established step-by-step release process involves:

• Versioning on GIT, or version control, recording changes to a file over time so we can look back and retrieve any older information easily.
• Development build environments utilizing Docker allow us to create a configurable developer environment where all the code and tools are available to review all changes, implement new code, and more on a system that matches that of the production environment.
• Staging environments that mirror production environments for thorough testing before a large release, which includes client user acceptance testing (UAT).
• Installations on live production environments that are released outside of peak traffic times to avoid disruptions for your site users.
• Smoke testing once an update is released to an environment.
• Communication post-release to our clients, including areas of impact and test cases for UAT.

Website Maintenance Frequency

While frequency can depend on the website’s complexity and data, it is recommended to perform website maintenance at least once per month. On our end, we perform website maintenance at a daily, monthly and yearly frequency.

• Daily. We do daily monitoring, which pings client websites to check for uptime to ensure the website is running without issues. If we get a notification of an outage, we can respond immediately. In addition, we monitor site uptime and performance problems 24/7 so we can inform our clients of any downtime as we work to identify and resolve issues.
• Monthly. As part of our maintenance process, we perform regular analytic monitoring to ensure we understand user behavior and overall website performance. At the monthly level, we arrange strategy meetings to discuss all progress related to website maintenance, enhancements, and future priorities to consistently groom and grow the site. These findings are provided in a transparent monthly analytic report.
• Yearly. We do yearly recaps and year-over-year comparisons to evaluate enhancement and maintenance needs as the platform grows. This is a great opportunity for us to review website performance day-to-day, quarter over quarter, and even identify specific areas where we saw exceptional results or areas to improve. As websites grow, website maintenance becomes more dynamic and complex, and this yearly recap gives everyone a better sense of upcoming needs and areas in which we can evolve our process.

The Web Tech Fusion Approach

At Web Tech Fusion, we have managed and maintained websites for large and small organizations for almost 20 years. Our process is streamlined and effective in keeping your website fresh with the latest content and operating smoothly from a technological standpoint.