Website Maintenance: An Essential Cleansing Process

Your website resembles a plant. It will perish if you don’t look after it so you must nurture your website if you want it to thrive. Although you won’t be able to offer your website nutrients, water, or sunlight to grow, there are other things you can do to help it continually develop. 

It is essential to have a website that automates the process of gathering leads and requests for your company, but there could be goblins hiding behind your website that is stopping you from obtaining a potential lead. Even the most well-functioning website will periodically experience bugs, whether in terms of functionality or of your whole intrinsic web development process. Methodical cleaning and monitoring will aid in identifying and resolving these website problems, as well as chasing away the goblins. We’ve put together a comprehensive website maintenance guide that you can use to keep your website running smoothly and maximize revenue and success. 

1. Check for Broken Links. How would you feel if you clicked on a certain link and the page didn’t open? Well, you don’t want your website visitors to have a poor user experience just as much as you don’t want one either. Check if all the links on your website are working properly. If you have any dynamic content which keeps changing, make sure that the links are also updated and old ones are deleted.
2. Remove Outdated Web Content. This is one of the most underrated but important exercises when it comes to website maintenance. Cleaning up your website by removing outdated content keeps your website up to date with the latest affairs. You can either modify old content with current updates or move it right to the trash. 
3. Analyze your Website Performance. With the plethora of tools handy, you can easily analyze and get ahead of your competition. Tools like Google Analytics help to understand how your website is performing in terms of speed, traffic, etc. You can also easily identify the critical areas of improvement which are performing lower based on industry benchmarks and goals you set yourself. We care about you! And hence, we have provided the list of tools you can use for this activity at the end of this article.
4. Test Website Forms. Website forms are one of the ways to collect information about your visitors like email addresses and other queries. It is crucial to have properly functioning website forms that will accurately capture all the information you require. When we often fill out forms, we expect a reply. The same goes for your website visitors. Ensure that the queries are addressed on time to create a positive user experience. This creates new opportunities and might also lead to potential sales. 
5. Check all the Images. This is a time-consuming task but worth the effort. Images are attention seekers! Do you want to keep visitors engaged with the website? If your answer is yes, you should carve out some time to analyze the images. Make sure all images are properly loaded when the website opens, keep thumbnails clear and visible. Your visitors might not remember what they’ve read but they will surely remember what they’ve seen! If you are already updating these, ensure you have alt text for images to optimize your SEO performance. 
6. Secure your Website. Prevention is better than a cure. Be it with your own health or your website’s. You don’t want to end up being a victim of a cyber-attack. Any lapses in terms of security might lead to huge losses. Hence, be on top of it by including SSL Certificates which encrypt the data and make your information secure during transmission. Do not take this lightly!

Why is Website Maintenance Important for SEO?