What Is A Website Health Check & Why Do I Need One?
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How healthy is your website?
Often when we’re asked to build a website, the client expects it to work flawlessly forever. The truth is, it won’t. Websites break—most of the time because they’re out-of-date, or some plug-ins just stopped working, or it’s taking time to load, or scariest of all, it has been victimised by cybercriminals. Yikes!
Many website owners just don’t give their websites the needed love and attention, and so they get all too surprised when things get bad. The website starts falling off, their customers get turned off, they ask someone to rebuild it, and they get a hefty bill for the work.
But you can avoid losing a huge chunk of sales and having to spend heaps on website repair by having a simple and inexpensive website health check plan.
What does a monthly health check involve?
Updates
WordPress is software, which means it needs to be updated regularly. WordPress sites are made up of a variety of plugins and themes, which, give shape to your website. They, too, require constant updates. Apart from providing the features and functionalities, these apps also increase your site’s security, covering up vulnerabilities and strengthening your site against cyber attacks. Moreover, updating your plugins and themes will help fix bugs existing in earlier versions, so you won’t have to worry about errors on certain features of your site.
Security
Much as we love the Internet, it’s not exactly the safest place in the world. You may have installed a really cool plugin but found that it’s carrying malware, infecting your website and putting your entire system at risk. Creepy cyber crawlers are also lurking everywhere, waiting for any chance to exploit your website. Any outdated software can give hackers the access to your system, and once they found their way inside, they will spread malicious content, take personal information and misuse them for monetary gains, and worse of all, shut down your site completely. To fend off would-be attackers, you need to check and update your site regularly.
Backups
Yes, technology rules the world, but this is no guarantee that it won’t mess up. The most frustrating thing that could happen to any business owner is to entrust all crucial data to the web and then losing all these data later on. Unless of course, you’ve done the most sensible thing of backing up data?
If not, then that’s a big problem. Backups are an important part of any website maintenance plan. Technology fails sometimes, and so you want to have a secure location where you can safely backup all of your site’s data. If by some wicked twist of fate your website crashes, you can regain access to your data—files, photos, webpages, posts—and it would be easier to repair your site
Speed
People want to get their information fast, fast, fast. So if you’re website is taking longer than forever to load, chances are your potential customer will have to look elsewhere. In fact, research shows that 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
There are a number of reasons your webpages are not loading fast enough—could be a server issue, image sizes too big and not optimised, broken links, etc. The thing is, the only thing you can be on top of these issues is if you are making regular website maintenance.
Improve search engine ranking
Just regularly updating your webpages and images can help boost your rankings in Google. Websites that have old, outdated content generally rank poorly in search engines. Google, for instance, checks your site’s “modified since” header to determine whether its bots should crawl it or not.
Google’s algorithms are also changing all the time, so you need to be up-to-speed with the latest trends and changes in search algorithms to retain your top rankings.
Don’t get overwhelmed, I know this looks a lot of work to you. That’s why we’re here to help! Our Client Care Plans are designed to give you the ultimate when it comes to website maintenance, plus really flexible packages for your different needs. Whether you need offsite backups, plugin updates, updates for WordPress core files, database optimisation, malware scanning and Google Analytics support, we’ve got you covered. A little tune-up now and again can make a huge difference to your site.