Keeping a business website in peak condition is something that is far easier said than done. Here’s the technology and processes you need in place to ensure website maintenance is taken care of once and for all.
Website maintenance is something that often falls through the cracks in terms of job descriptions. Website managers have multiple priorities to juggle, which often span from marketing to managing external agencies. IT professionals have numerous elements of a company’s technical suite to take care of, from networked systems to maintaining software. It’s often when an issue arises on a website that a company realizes that better care needs to directed towards the day-to-day maintenance of a website.
When you get into the nuts and bolts of website maintenance, it can seem like an extensive and laborious process. There is everything from security certificates to online shop processes to keep on top of, plus a variety of other website building blocks in between. Bugs, poor loading times and broken links can appear without any notice. So what is the most efficient way of managing the website maintenance process so that businesses can carry on without interruption?
Automated Testing
By far one of the best time-savers in the website maintenance world is to incorporate automated website testing into your business practice. Website testing is all about testing every bit of functionality on a website. In many companies, hundreds of hours are lost to extensive website testing processes that have a lot of manual elements. Website testing is most valuable in transaction-based website sections, because if a form breaks or someone cannot complete a purchase on a website, it can have hugely detrimental impacts on a business.
There are solutions such as the testRigor test automation tool where it is possible to have website testing almost constantly running in the background. With tools such as this, there is no website downtime, issues are flagged in a timely way, and employees can avoid spending more time than necessary on inefficient testing processes.
Check Your Content
Many websites have pages or whole sections of content that are embarrassingly outdated. The reason is that most businesses do not have the capacity for one person to be responsible for every single page of content on a website. However, a website is a shop window to the world, and a reflection of your brand to each and every person who visits. Website content must be a priority within the website maintenance process.
Often, a workable solution is found not in tasking one individual to take responsibility for an entire website, but for subject experts across an organization to share the load. It makes sense for individuals who know about a part of the business to take responsibility for keeping specific web pages up-to-date. Not only does this work from a business efficiency perspective, it also gives colleagues across an organization a vested interest in the website. This helps to make it a better website overall.
Review Hosting Services
If your website has problems with going down sometimes, chances are you need to review your hosting solution. Problems with hosts and downtime add extra but unnecessary tasks to a website maintenance schedule. Look into the reasons for any previous website downtime and interrogate the security of your host. Also work on solid back-up plans. Many robust businesses have a number of back-up servers, so as long as you backup your website frequently, you can switch to another version of your live website even if one server has problems. If you have a secure and reliable hosting solution, this will save you an abundance of time in the long run.
Check Accessibility
One element of website maintenance that many businesses forget is accessibility. If a website is working ok for a small group of individuals who manage and maintain it, the temptation is to think that it is working ok for everyone. In fact, ensuring a website is accessible for people with different accessibility needs is not only important, it is the law. And even if your website conformed to accessibility criteria when you most recently revamped or relaunched it, the rules may well have moved on since then.
Looking at the latest accessibility guidelines and using website checkers to see if your website conforms to them is something you should most definitely make time for. Make sure you look at federal laws and international bodies, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. The information published by international bodies such as this help you create a better website for disabled people and for people accessing your website on different devices. Not only do you want to adhere to the laws, most businesses like to think of themselves as being inclusive for everyone. It is fundamental to ensure this is the case by regularly checking your website accessibility performance.