Website Maintenance: Plan for problems and you’ll save time and money

So you’ve built your website. You have a beautiful design, killer content and intuitive functionality. Sure, there were a few challenges along the way, but you’ve overcome them.

Job done right? You can sit back and watch your site visitors and business grow.

Wrong.

Yes, you can crack open a beer and congratulate yourself on a job well done. But now you also need to consider this fact of online life: every website needs web maintenance at some point in its life.

To help you we’ve listed some website maintenance concepts you might need to consider.

Website maintenance is not glamorous, but crucial

Like any preventative activity – keeping healthy, building your retirement fund – it’s easy to put off action until tomorrow. But like with these two examples, website maintenance planned now will prevent a lot of pain later. The normal situation for those that hit major problems with their websites (and have not planned ahead for site maintenance) is they end up throwing any amount of money at the problem, just to get their website back up and running again.

Think of web maintenance like looking after a car engine. Regularly changing the oil will ensure the engine runs smoothly. Let the engine run out of oil and eventually it will seize up and cost you a fortune to repair.

Website changes are inevitable

Like death and taxes you will have to change your website in the future. So start planning for that now, understand how you will allow you website to cope with increased traffic, or how possible functionality additions will fit with your current site structure and design.

You will find bugs

You’ve tested cross-browser, cross-platform and there are no bugs. But as your website traffic grows one of your site users will eventually point out a bug or two. This is very normal as your website handles larger volumes of users and is one of the main reasons why website maintenance is important.

Backup your website and avoid future pain

Websites do get hacked, and so backing up your website’s data is an important part of website maintenance. Preventing problems is always cheaper and less stressful than correcting them.

Be in control when your website gets bigger

Hopefully you’re planning to grow your website. That means more content and more people who visit and buy from you. So website maintenance is also about managing this process effectively.

You have to think about how increased traffic is going to affect your site’s performance and stability before you reach that spike in visitor numbers. You might begin by purchasing bigger and faster servers to handle the volumes. Whatever you do you need to ensure all your data is correct and that access speeds for your site visitors are fast enough.

Twitter is a recent high-profile example where they were not able to cope with the surges in traffic they received as the popularity of their service exploded. They did not have an adequate website maintenance plan in place. And they were heavily criticised for it.

For better websites listen to your customers

People are going to complain about your website at some point. Some will be complaining about service and products, but many will be complaining directly about using your website. Don’t get annoyed with these visitors. What they tell you is hugely valuable. They will point out usability issues and suggest additions to functionality that perhaps you had never considered. Your website is an evolving creature, so listening to your site users and including this as a part of your website maintenance plan will save you a lot of time and money.

Because your website is an ongoing project, it’s important to set aside a budget from the beginning. It doesn’t matter how you build your website – whether its custom built or created using a CMS like Wordpress – you will have a monthly and yearly website maintenance cost.

Of course we’ve thought about your ongoing website maintenance here at Alertra. Our service allows you to create maintenance schedules to indicate those times when your monitored devices are normally offline for maintenance. We automatically suspend monitoring during those periods to prevent alerts and to keep the offline time from being reflected in uptime statistics.