8 things to do every month for good Nigerian WordPress website maintenance

Website owners routinely need to observe some website maintenance events to keep their websites online, safe and functional.

We have divided them into time periods – weekly, monthly, biannual, and annual events.

Outlined below are activities we recommend you observe every month to maintain your website.

1. Update your contact details

You often need to review the contact information on your site, are the links functional?

Is your phone number up to date?

When a user decides to pay for your product or services, you should make it easy for them.

Indicate your contact details on every page of your site.

What of the contact forms?

Are they working properly?

Ghost test them, are there any issues with email delivery?

No one wants to call a business number and realize it’s not active or fill out a broken contact form.

2. Review user access

You often need to review access to certain aspects of your website, a non-active guest author access needs to be revoked.

Did you promote an author and yet to make him an editor?

You should do that.

Review your administrators as well, are they all still active?

You don’t want to give total access to an inactive user making room for hackers to make their way into your website.

3. Change your passwords

Website security is important and common in the world today, both high and low-profile websites get hacked all the time.

An important way to stay safe is to update your passwords.

You need to continually review your passwords to keep hackers out.

Make use of a different combination of numbers, alphabets, and symbols.

This applies to all your users, you should insist your subscribers make use of hard passwords as well.

4. Fix broken links and errors

Broken links hurt your website, you lose visitors and rank lower in search engines.

Broken links lead to 404 errors which are annoying to your visitors who are faced with a “page not found” message instead of the content they are looking for.

Test your links to make sure they take the user where they are meant to go.

No matter what you do, you’ll end up with broken links on your website from time to time hence, on finding them, either replace them with updated links or remove them entirely.

This goes for both internal links (links between pages on your site) and external links (links to another website).

External links management can be a hassle as the owners might change their link structure (permalinks) without informing you.

Routinely review your links and fix them appropriately.

5. Test all contact forms

Ensure to go through the process of filling out all the forms on the website.

Do this on all available devices and browsers, especially the common ones your visitors might use.

Make sure they are not broken and that you receive all the information as the form requests.

If any of your forms are not working right, you could be missing out on valuable leads, so make sure you quickly identify and fix any issues with your forms.

6. Clean out the media library

Temporary media files and media duplicates can really eat up storage space on your server, thereby slowing down your website.

Remove media duplicates and files you no longer need.

Use low-size, high-quality images on your site, and reduce media file sizes before uploading to increase site load speed.

7. Make Test Purchases

If you run an eCommerce website, the most important type of functionality on your website is the payment feature.

If this has a problem, you will lose out on payments until you fix it.

You should test the payment feature, on different devices and browsers, by picking any of your products and making payment for it.

Ensure the payment is hassle-free as designed.

Most of your visitors would not alert you that they couldn’t make a purchase, they’ll go on over to a competitor site instead.

8. Review website analytics

Website analytics provides an insight into how your website is doing e.g. an average number of unique visitors per day, the pages and posts with the most views, the geography and demographics of your audience, how your visitors find you, and how often people stay on your site, etc.

It provides the evidence to determine how well your site connects with your target market.

These data can help you plan your strategies – content, social media, email marketing, etc.

They can inspire new content that may improve your site traffic.

Google Analytics is a common and robust analytics tool you can look into.

While some sites would benefit from checking their analytics monthly, newer websites especially would have to wait a while as traffic would be slow at the start.

As website analytics is huge and demands time to go through all the insights, the basics can be covered monthly, with a complete review at least twice a year.

Conclusion

Website maintenance is vital for website success.

There are weekly, biannual, and annual maintenance activities, added to these monthly ones to do to keep your website up and running.