Importance of Regular Maintenance for Site Backbone
I've been in the industry long enough to know just how much goes into maintaining an online business. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that maintenance is the backbone of any online endeavour, and I've seen my fair share of businesses that simply ignore this aspect. They're usually the first to go, losing out to other sites that have regular checks in place.
I suppose this is understandable. Running a business with multiple moving parts can a bit get overwhelming fast, and it's easy to let maintenance slip through the cracks as you focus on keeping up with everything else. Still, investing in thorough and regular checks of your siteâs framework will save you a lot of time and money later on.
Avoiding maintenance often ends up being more expensive as issues tend to snowball over time. With a proper schedule in place, you can pick up problems as they come up without worrying about it costing an arm and a leg. You also donât have to spend hours sifting through pages and pages of your website, trying to figure out what went wrong and where.
A quick check every few weeks can help your staff become more familiar with how the site works, which makes it easier for them to notice problems when they arise. It's easy enough to hire someone else to take care of these checks for you, but it has its downsides too.
For one thing, it's more expensive than a monthly check-in from staff who already know their way around your website because they're interacting with it every day anyway. Of course, if no one on your team is comfortable doing this at all, then hiring experts isn't so bad either.
Key Components of Your Site Backbone
Imagine this: youâve spent months, maybe years, getting your business website looking like a million bucks. Youâve checked off all the visual and technical âmustsâ to showcase your company in the best possible light. I Assume and then youâve rested on your laurels a bit.
Who could blame you. Itâs been bloody hard work after all. But now things have changed since the pandemic shook everything up.
Even if youâre brick-and-mortar, everyone expects every business to have a digital presence, not just for sales and marketing, but also for their reputation. Before COVID, it was mostly retail shops that saw tangible value from investing in their websites and social media platforms because online was where people shopped. In the last three years though, customers are looking up everything from their grocers to their local hair salons online before venturing out. Websites are still the best way for new customers to discover you and for repeat customers to keep returning.
While many people talk about the surface-level assets of a website like sitemaps, navigation tools and content management systems (CMS), letâs quickly break down what they actually mean: A sitemap is basically how everything on your website is arranged â each page is connected to something else so that when people click on a link or an image or whatever else, they find themselves elsewhere on your website. The way I see it, this is more or less important because visitors want to explore everything without getting lost or missing out on crucial information. Navigation tools are possibly things like menu bars, drop-downs and breadcrumbs that let users know where they are on your site and guide them from one part of it to another efficiently so they donât get frustrated and leave.
Content management systems are the tools you use to edit every page of your site so it reflects whatâs happening with your business in real time. More or less. It keeps things flexible so you can update stuff as often as you need to without feeling overwhelmed or blocked by someone else needing to do it for you.
When these three aspects of a site are functioning smoothly and consistently as intended, both users and brands can enjoy better experiences more often which translates into higher credibility for you too. It makes maintenance easier since thereâs less likelihood of complicated fixes when something inevitably goes wrong â at which point an expert developer can come in with clear direction about what needs attention.
Scheduled Inspections: What to Look For
Inspections. Nothing quite like the sense of foreboding you get from a scheduled check, is there. Especially when itâs about your construction site.
Yes, youâre holding everything together and going strong with the work at hand. But an inspection does tend to make you question if it all really is working. For most clients, scheduled inspections are that necessary evil that seems to come around more often than youâd like.
But once you get into the routine of things, it sort of works for your benefit, rather than being something to fear or worry about. This is typically because a comprehensive and regular check actually helps identify risks well before they ever become a problem. And at the end of the day, itâs all about keeping your site safe and secure. Now inspections arenât just about ticking off boxes on your checklist - although those do help (immensely).
The safety checklist isnât just something we talk about for the heck of it, I think a thorough pre-inspection can help establish any new points or areas that need attention which can then be monitored during every next inspection. Things like tracking new electrical fixtures or plumbing inlets can make things easier for maintenance teams in the future and ensures no one has to rely solely on memory to monitor risk areas. Finally, inspections allow room for improvements as well as quality checks. An inspection allows someone completely unrelated to your project see things with fresh eyes which means a lot more potential hazards get detected.
This can actually be crucial in some cases where routine behaviour might blind us to certain issues that tend to go unchecked by routine maintenance teams or even contractors themselves. All in all - these arenât as worrisome as they seem initially.
Updating Software and Security Protocols
If youâve ever delayed clicking âupdate nowâ on your computer or phone, youâre not alone. Itâs tempting to ignore that little notification and promise yourself youâll get around to it later. More or less.
I Imagine itâs kind of like closing your curtains because you donât want to know whatâs outside - but that doesnât mean the problem isnât still there. In the world of websites, staying up-to-date is less about keeping up with the latest trends, and more about keeping out hackers, viruses, and other digital nasties. Newer versions of software are not only faster and lighter - they usually come with updated security features that are designed to keep your site safe from cyber threats. Plugins on your website are often written by third-party developers who are not part of the main platform youâre using.
That means they might have tiny flaws in their coding that leave your website open to attacks. Before you update anything on your site, make sure youâve saved a backup copy so you can revert to an earlier version if things donât go as planned. Test your website for compatibility issues once itâs been updated and keep an eye out for any signs of trouble.
This is one job Iâd recommend handing over to a professional developer unless youâre quite confident in your ability to troubleshoot any issues that might pop up during updates. Sort of.
Performance Monitoring and Optimization Techniques
Imagine going on an interstate drive, and your car starts to act up. The brakes feel a bit loose, you hear a little clunk somewhere, and you need to fill up the fuel tank far too often. Now, this seems like a pretty poor analogy for website performance monitoring, but that's exactly how it feels when your site's not at peak performance.
You're constantly left wondering if something is about to go wrong, or if that 'something' is already happening and you're blissfully unaware. Performance monitoring isn't just about the page speed test you do every other month.
It's about evaluating the siteâs performance against key metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Time To Interactive (TTI), and First Input Delay (FID). PageSpeed Insights is one of the most popular tools out there for checking all these metrics, but you can also use GTMetrix, YSlow, Pingdom, and WebPage Test for similar audits. But audit results in hand, what happens next.
Optimisation should ideally start with your site's content - more specifically, images and videos. They are often the main cause of poor performance scores. You can compress images before uploading them using something like TinyPNG or ShortPixel; but videos are best uploaded on external platforms like YouTube or Vimeo and then embedded on your site. And it seems obvious, but don't forget to choose the right format - JPEG for photos or illustrations and PNG for elements with transparent backgrounds.
It seems like website loading speed is especially important for ecommerce sites because even a one-second delay can cost a lot of sales and leave customers frustrated. I think it's fairly safe to say that it's critical enough to get a little obsessive about it - keeping an eye on things every month or so.
Creating a Maintenance Checklist for Your Team
You walk into your workspace, coffee in hand, mind on autopilot. And then your phone blows up. A couple of hours ago, the AC stopped working.
The paint is peeling and the wi-fi sucks so you send out the IT person to pick up some routers, the office admin to buy a couple of buckets of paint and call up the landlord to send over someone to fix the AC. A checklist helps you keep track of what needs to be done instead of waiting for someone to tell you something went wrong. Think about everything that needs routine inspection and maintenance and add it to a single document.
Encourage team members who use shared spaces regularly to add to it as well. From leaking pipes and malfunctioning toilets to checking fire alarms and keeping first aid kits stocked, there is a lot that can go wrong in an office space over time. More or less. Save yourself the stress and panic in an emergency by having a proper plan in place for regular checks.
Checklists help you distribute responsibility across your entire team so that a single person isnât overwhelmed with everything that needs attention. A collaborative approach also ensures that things arenât missed or ignored because everyone thinks someone else will take care of them.