Free Website Maintenance Checklist 2023 ( Download Free PDF)

Building a website involves a lot of effort and money. However, a website cannot function on its own.  Even while things may be going well right now, there is no assurance that they will continue to operate smoothly. 

Website maintenance is all about managing your website.

You don’t want to turn away potential customers because your website is all cluttered, slow, or unsecure.

Like your favorite car, your website needs regular maintenance to be in peak shape. For your benefit, we have put up this comprehensive website maintenance checklist. 

You can either do it yourself or hire an expert team for website maintenance services. 

This website maintenance checklist 2023 is available as a downloadable pdf. We’ve arranged the chores according to how frequently you must do them to keep your site operational.
Table of Content:

1. Yearly
2. Quarterly
3. Monthly
4. Weekly

 

Yearly Website Maintenance Tasks

These are the tasks which should be performed once a year.

Yearly Content Audit

This may sound tricky, but it’s true. You have to keep on adding new content to your website, but there is something called yearly content audit.

We advise undertaking an annual content audit to make sure the content helps you raise your search engine position. Here, you may assess the performance of your site and catalog all of its content.

You can determine the content that generates the most traffic and conversions by evaluating. On the other hand, you can identify the information that doesn’t seem to be appealing to your target market. You may utilize this priceless knowledge to improve your content strategy.

Check all the content on your website and review it. Ensure to remove or update the outdated content. 

Domain and Hosting Renewals

Domain name is a critical aspect of your online identity. If you fail to renew your domain, you may discover one day that your site can’t be accessed. As a result, you should check the status of your domain and hosting renewals.

Even if you have set auto-renewals, please manually check your payment details. If your credit card expires, you may lose your domain or site hosting.

Review your About us Page

Customers might be persuaded that your firm is worthwhile by reading your appealing About page. Is. Too many businesses write their “About Us” pages without ever revisiting them, despite their relevance. It’s important to do a yearly review to guarantee that this page always accurately represents your business.

Add on your new highlights, achievements, and even write about your growth.

Make sure that your headers, footers, and legal policies are up to date

You should pay attention to your website’s headers and footers. Usually, you’ll utilize these components to display pertinent data, such as your contact information or business hours. Out-of-date information may lose conversions.

If your business practices change substantially, you must alter the header and footer immediately. Making an annual check ensures that no changes have gone unnoticed.

You might want to remove any out-of-date links. Also, your header or footer might benefit from some fresh information.

Websites typically include legal information about copyright and privacy policies. As laws change over time, it’s always worthwhile to keep up with the latest ones.

User Testing

You may find out how intuitive your website is by testing it on actual users. Most likely, you tested the usability of your website while it was being designed.

Although throughout time, the way users engage with websites has changed. The way the normal internet user interacts with your website might be significantly altered by new technological advancements, gadgets, or browser changes.

To verify the quality of your service, a usability test should be planned each year.

Quarterly Website Maintenance Tasks

Change Password

Cloudnine claims that over 80% of all cyber security assaults happen because of weak or stolen passwords. A variety of IT Security risks may be avoided by changing your password on a quarterly basis.

This has a lot of benefits like preventing unauthorized access, Limits Multiple Account Breaches, Prevent Constant Access, and limits guesswork.

Optimize Data Base and Query

A database may need to be optimized in order to be more user-friendly. It’s crucial to optimize databases consistently for a variety of reasons. The databases you utilize to manage your production activities include your company’s data. Efficient data management and SQL performance are the keys to corporate success.

As your database grows, so will the amount of data you store.

Performance will inevitably deteriorate with time for both you and your clients. 

You can potentially avoid performance issues due to database bottlenecks by checking and optimizing your database today.

Your company has to be scalable in order to stay adaptable and generate more money.  Every four months, optimize your database to improve future scalability.

Remove Extra Plugins and Themes

With every theme or plugin, you install, hackers will be able to exploit a vulnerability in your website. Plugins and themes account for 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities.

Themes and plugins on your website should be periodically reviewed and removed if no longer necessary.

Disabling the program might seem like a good idea if you need to restart it later. Deleted code is always safer, since hackers can access the disabled program.

By deleting any outdated photos, movies, or audio files, you may further limit your attack surface.

Review And Fix Broken Links

If you have broken links, Google cannot crawl your site; also, broken links prevent Google from moving on to another page. As a result, Google may believe that your website is not optimized or incomplete.

Using sites like Broken Link Check, SEMrush, or AHREF, you may check for broken links URLs on your website.

Monthly Website Maintenance Tasks

Monthly SEO optimization

When it comes to website maintenance, this is one task you cannot dodge. As a live site, you may already be aware of the keyword phrases you want to rank for. The volume and popularity of a term might fluctuate over time, so it is critical to assess whether your strategy has to be modified.

Using tools like Keyword surfer, SEMrush’s Keyword Overview, Google Trends, or Keyword Magic, you may examine the volume of the keywords.

You will need to adjust your SEO approach as needed to rank the keywords you’ve selected. You can’t just do that!

To accomplish this aim, a planned SEO strategy is required. 

You must review the rankings and volumes of all the existing keywords, analyse it and work on the SEO strategy accordingly.

Speed Testing

There are several reasons why website speed is important. Site speed is of utmost importance to online buyers in this age of immediate satisfaction.

 In fact, it has been found that faster websites have decreased bounce rates and greater conversion rates. 

The shorter the load time of your website, the less likely your visitors are to leave without making a purchase and the greater your chances of making a sale. Improve your website’s speed performance today to minimize future client acquisition costs.

 Along with enhancing user experience, site speed plays a significant role in search engine optimization.

You can test your site’s speed using a tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.

Weekly Website Maintenance Tasks

Posting Content

Whether it’s a cool and innovative product, an excellent how-to video, or a freshly updated blog, visitors are hoping to websites to find something interesting. 

But what if they don’t discover any fresh information? They might return to check again one or two times, but after that, they’re probably lost for good.

Your audience will remain engaged if you post new content on a regular basis. It is not necessary to write a 3,000-word article every week. Consistency is key. Fresh and informative content attracts visitors.

You may easily and often add high-quality, secure, and user-friendly content to your website.

All of the major search engines use bots or web crawlers for the aim of locating and indexing fresh information that can be included in search results. 

Therefore, it should go without saying that the more frequently you update your content, the more often search engines will visit your website, increasing your chances of ranking higher.

Make sure the content you share is high-quality and helpful; otherwise, you risk losing ground in the search engine results.

Analyse Matrics

Website analytics give you accurate statistics and information about the age, gender, location, and other demographics of users on your site. 

In addition, you can see the traffic source, the most popular content, the total number of conversions, and other information on these charts. By taking appropriate action, you can enhance their user experience. 

Frequent analysis of your statistics can help you identify problems that need to be fixed. 

Analytics tools like Google Analytics show you what content receives the most views, the average time spent on each page, and the bounce rate, so you can study and improve it for higher engagement.

Website analytics also help you improve SEO. 

Using website analytics, you can track the traffic source, examine referral patterns, and concentrate on developing referral-growth tactics.

A sales report is crucial to any business, whether you sell physical products, software, or online services. Google Analytics provides all your eCommerce metrics. More sales can be generated by optimizing them.

Malware Scanning

Website malware scanners can help organizations prevent malware problems.

Website malware scanners analyze the website to find malware using a variety of techniques and procedures, including looking for abnormal activity. You can proactively eliminate the virus and maintain your website’s security this way.

Malware-infected websites are blacklisted by all major browsers. Notifications alert users that a website may be dangerous or malicious. As a result, your website will become inaccessible to genuine visitors unless you resolve the problems.

In the current environment of increasingly sophisticated malware attacks, malware is one of the most significant cybersecurity concerns enterprises face. As a result, website malware scanners are a necessity for all types of websites and businesses.

Site Backup

Having a backup of your website will ensure that it can be fully restored in the event of an error or failure. A site backup is helpful if you accidentally delete some crucial components like a theme, plugin, or module damages your website, or if the website is hacked.

You should make regular backups a priority. It is possible that you will lose all of your most recent work, as well as your entire website, if you fall behind.

A few hosting companies offer the option of taking care of backups automatically, but if you want, you can create backups manually.

Comments

Visitors are more likely to engage with your website when the comment area is active. However, the comment sections have a negative side. Attackers may use spammy comments to lure you into posting harmful stuff.

Additionally, some comments may contain rude or inappropriate language. This may negatively impact your website. You might wish to use a comment moderation plugin because of this.

WordPress allows you to place all submissions in an approval queue by default. Reserved comments should be reviewed at least once a week.

Conclusion:

A website maintenance checklist is necessary for every website’s efficient operation. A website requires frequent check-ups and upgrades to ensure it is operating well, much as we must constantly maintain our vehicles to avoid malfunctions or failures.

This 2023 website maintenance checklist will make sure that users have the best possible experience. When website maintenance is neglected, it can result in technical problems, security breaches, and a bad user experience, all of which can have an adverse effect.

Consider your website to be a virtual showroom or workplace. You should maintain your website in the same manner that you would keep your physical store. Tidy, organized, and up to date. By doing this, you may make a good impression on your visitors and clients and eventually contribute to the success of your organization.

Take the time to go through this checklist of website maintenance tasks to ensure that your website is ready for 2023 and beyond. Your clients and website visitors will appreciate it!

You can create a downloadable checklist using this .