8 Signs Your Website is in Urgent Need of Regular Maintenance
- Feb 08, 2023
- Chen Wei
- No Comments
Website maintenance is the practice of monitoring your site’s health and performance.
Once you create a website to reinforce your brand’s online presence, you need to maintain it to assure it keeps generating revenue.
Having a well-maintained site is the first step to a strong first impression. If you don’t maintain your site, it will tarnish your image. With that said, following are some sure tell signs that your site needs immediate rescue.
1. Non-Tech Savvy Website Manager
Maintaining a company website is not challenging unless you have high technical requirements, high traffic, or an abundance of content. However, it will be an issue if you are not a tech-savvy website owner or have a tech-savvy manager or in-house team.
Even if you have a modest website, it will need regular backups and updates and might need help with some other issues. If you don’t know how to take care of these issues yourselves, you better consult with a professional agency or an expert developer. They can diagnose your website and suggest the right action with actionable advice that fits your needs.
Doing so will help you get the most out of your business website, ensuring it serves its purpose. Otherwise, if you are not regularly keeping your site up to date, you are wasting resources.
2. Slow Loading Speed
Slow-loading speeds are a cry for help!
There are multiple reasons why your site is slow, and you better perform a full diagnosis on it. Some common reasons that slow down a website are:
Too Many Plugins: Every plugin installed on your site will load when you load or reload a webpage. It doesn’t matter whether the plugins relate to the specific page; they will burden the page, and hence the cause of speed issues.
Unminified Code: CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code used in themes and plugins have some unnecessary clutter. It takes white space; if your code has much white space, it takes longer to process, hence slow loading time.
Lack of CDN: Aiming for International traffic needs you to employ a CDN Network of distributed servers. This network cuts off the information distance from users who want to reach the information, thus cutting the loading time.
If you use a single server to store and share your content in every corner of the world. Doing so will only lead to slow loading time or request time-outs.
Large Image Size: Large files take more time to load and can slow down your website, even for images. It’s necessary for SEO purposes and to deliver a good user experience. Therefore, you must find the right balance between file size and quality.
Shared Hosting: SMBs opt for sharing hosting and DIY websites to save costs. Shared hosting is acceptable when you have a low traffic, but when your traffic and business grow, shared hosting will lead to poor user experience and slow loading issues.
Regardless of your website’s slow loading speed, it affects the user experience, SERP performance, and Ranking. It encourages people to leave your site, thus increasing your high bounce rate, which is another website KPI.
If you don’t take speed optimization seriously, it will adversely affect your site’s Ranking and cost you valuable business.
3. Piling Updates
Timely and continuous updates are necessary to maintain a successful website.
Most website platforms are open-source, meaning their source code is visible to everyone. It leaves your site vulnerable to security breaches, hacks, and malware attacks. Your platform (WordPress, Wix, Shopify, etc.) has a community that keeps watch on these vulnerabilities and offers continuous patches or updates to fight them off.
Still, a large and technically advanced website is more complex to update. Besides the core updates, you also need to focus on plugin and theme updates.
Most websites are designed and developed by different bodies (developers, designers, or platforms), so you will need additional coding and adjustments to ensure your site doesn’t break after updates. Hiring a dedicated agency for this task can help you.
4. Malfunctioning Plugins
Plugins let you improve your website’s features and functionality. If you install too many plugins or don’t maintain them properly, it will lead to security concerns or incompatibility with your site.
New website owners often install most add-ons they come across, even keeping plugins that have no benefit to offer, only burdening their website. You should regularly update your plugins and manage them properly, keeping the useful ones and removing the useless ones from time to time.
5. Irregular Backups
Do you create regular backups of your site?
If not, then when was the last time you backed up your site?
You might be in trouble if you don’t remember the date.
Regular backups are just as important as regular updates. These backups ensure your website’s data is safe and can be used if there is an issue with your site.
Besides scheduled events, check your website before every update to ensure you have created a recent backup to mitigate data loss if something goes wrong. It’s a part of regular website maintenance, and you better not neglect it under any circumstance, even if you do DIY web maintenance.
6. Poor SERP Rankings
Several factors affect your SERP Rankings. Search engine regulations are ever-evolving (even though the effects of these changes right away), but they do catch up with every website.
Whether you hire a dedicated SEO agency or do DIY SEO, you will see unsatisfactory results from time to time because of some hidden technical issues (that will mitigate if you maintain your website properly).
Anything can affect your SERP and Ranking, including your website’s layout, is it optimized for mobile or not? Your meta-tags, are they SEO-optimized? What about redirects? Have you audited your website recently for bad or broken links? What about your data structure? Have you invested in it?
Even if you implement these facets and carry out an SEO audit, you still won’t be able to resolve every issue. Technical SEO comes into play here. It plays an important role in your website’s Ranking, and depending on your site’s maintenance plan, your web maintenance agency might resolve it for you (or at least show you where these issues arise from).
7. Outdated Design
Depending on when your site was built, who designed and developed it, and how well they did it, your site’s design might be outdated (and you might not have a clue about it).
Web design trends change often, and catching up can be challenging. If your website looked well-designed a few years, you still need to change it because Web 3.0 is rolling out now, and you need to keep up with the trend.
You must equip your site with new technologies or trends to keep attracting more customers and help cement your online reputation. While the design is not a part of your website’s maintenance plan, it’s a core element of your online presence, so make sure your website looks and feels good.
Whether your web maintenance caters to this depends on their team, experience, and service. Therefore, we recommend you set up a budget for web maintenance, learn more about your website’s upkeep needs, and find the right agency.
8. Random Website Errors
Even if you spend top dollar on your website’s maintenance, your site will still have some bugs and errors. Some common issues are redirects, glitches, etc. Regular website audits can help identify these issues beforehand, and you can resolve them timely.
You can outsource this auditing and monitoring to a web management agency or hire an in-house team based on your budget or resources.
Bottomline
Despite your website’s size or type, it needs regular maintenance. Your website’s platform is continuously updated to improve its technology and user experience.
Failing to maintain your website can have severe consequences for your online presence, with Google de-ranking or even wiping out your website. So, consider maintaining your website regularly; whether you outsource it to another agency, get an in-house team, or DIY, make sure it gets done.
Hello! I’m Chen Wei, your cyber sentinel at WebSumo. Navigating the labyrinth of web security is my forte. I specialize in outsmarting digital tricksters and fortifying online fortresses. Off-duty, I merge my love for AI with cybersecurity, crafting innovative defenses. Join me in this thrilling cyber adventure!