What does website maintenance include?

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is the continuous monitoring and upkeep of essential website elements to guarantee seamless operations. The main considerations include security, performance, third-party updates and content quality optimization. Establishing a structured website maintenance blueprint is crucial for sustained upkeep.

Website maintenance concerns dynamic websites more than static ones. And because dynamic websites are built more often on content management systems (like WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Webflow, Blogger, do you remember Joomla?!) provided by third parties, updates to source code are provided regularly and these updates then have to be implemented on your backend setup.

Example: WordPress

Let’s take WordPress as an example. WordPress is an open-source content management system and blog publishing system, based on PHP and MySQL.
WordPress is used by 45.8% of all websites on the internet. (W3Techs, 2023). An estimated 728 million websites use WordPress. 14.7% of the top websites in the world are powered by WordPress. WordPress holds a whopping 65.1% market share in CMS systems. Millions of publications are posted every day using WordPress.
WordPress is written and coded in PHP. New features are regularly introduced, issues are fixed and changes are made to stay current and ahead of the competition. These changes are introduced as new version upgrades.

Code updates are rolled out as major updates, when new features are introduced, usually two to three times yearly. Minor updates are security enhancements and fixes. These are rolled out as needed. And then PHP updates to the WordPress software’s hosting server will have to be updated every three years, at least. These crucial updates form part of your first aspect of basic website maintenance.

Hand-in-hand with this is your website’s functionality and plugin updates. Eg. WooCommerce for your online shop and processing online payments; bookings, ticket sales, etc. Plugin updates occur more frequently and mostly address bug fixes and security updates. Another key aspect of website maintenance and that ensuring your website runs smoothly.

The beauty of website maintenance is that it is a consistent opportunity to keep your website secure by updating the source code, updating your security programs, backing up your data, and running scans for malware and intrusions.

Benefits of website maintenance.

Web maintenance time is also great for installing new features that add security to user identity verification, transactions and data transfers.

Your website maintenance routine is an opportunity to uphold SEO best practices. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality of your website’s content so search engines, like Google and Bing, are more likely to recommend it in their results. When search engine users click your webpage, it is labelled as organic traffic – for most popular websites, this is a main source of visitors.

Additional SEO maintenance would include optimising your images’ alt text, aim for backlinks from established websites and write compelling titles and meta descriptions. This way you’ll gradually get more visitors.

Use metrics to improve your website’s efficacy.

It’s essential to tune your website so its features align with your business objectives. The key is measuring your efforts by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). Web maintenance time is your cue to review your KPIs and identify areas needing improvement to meet your goals effectively.

For example, imagine you are focused on acquiring new customers. During web maintenance, if set up correctly beforehand, you can review your website traffic, bounce rate and session duration to identify pages with thriving features.

The success factor of those features can then be replicated in other places to attract more visitors, increase your engagement rates, lower your bounce rates and increase session durations. In other words, your website becomes more compelling.