The essential website maintenance checklist (10 areas you need to take care of)

Most business websites are under-maintained and therefore underperform. Website Maintenance is a crucial part of a successful digital marketing strategy and at Artist Dynamix, we will tell you that the day your website is launched is the day the real website work begins.

A website needs to deliver results constantly. That’s not possible without website maintenance to keep it secure, functional, updated, and performing at its best.

The panicked question then becomes “Eeek! What exactly is website maintenance?” It is often followed by a barrage of follow-ups: “What bases do I need to cover to do it well? Is updating content part of maintenance?”

Today, the confusion ends.

We’ve got you covered. Below is the ultimate website maintenance checklist to help you keep your website in top shape. Whether you’re a DIY enthusiast or just want to understand what goes into maintaining a healthy site, this guide has everything you need to ensure your online presence stays on point.

1. Security

• Regular Backups: Schedule automatic daily or weekly backups of your website and database to ensure you can restore your site if something goes wrong.
• Update CMS, Plugins, and Themes: Regularly update your content management system (like WordPress), plugins, and themes to the latest versions to protect against vulnerabilities.
• SSL Certificate Check: Ensure your SSL certificate is active (this keeps your site secure and shows the padlock icon in the browser).
• Security Scans: Use tools like Wordfence or Sucuri to regularly scan for malware and vulnerabilities on your site.
• Password Management: Regularly update passwords for all user accounts, and ensure they are strong (use a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols).

2. Performance

• Speed Optimization: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check your page load times. Reduce file sizes, optimize images, and minimize code (e.g., CSS, JavaScript) to improve speed.
• Image Optimization: Compress images using tools like TinyPNG or ShortPixel and consider converting them to modern formats like WebP.
• Database Optimization: Use a plugin like WP-Optimize to clean up your database, removing unnecessary data like old revisions and spam comments.
• Browser Caching: Enable browser caching so that visitors don’t have to download all files every time they visit your site. This can usually be set up through your hosting provider or with a plugin.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN like Cloudflare distributes your content across multiple servers around the world, speeding up delivery to users. Setting this up usually involves signing up for a CDN service and adjusting your DNS settings.

3. Content Management

• Broken Links Check: Use tools like Broken Link Checker or Screaming Frog to scan your site for links that don’t work, and fix or remove them.
• Content Updates: Regularly refresh your website content to keep it relevant. Update blog posts, images, and product descriptions as needed.
• SEO Review: Use a tool like Yoast SEO to ensure your meta tags, titles, and descriptions are optimized. These are the snippets of text that appear in search results.
• Blog Posting: Keep a consistent blogging schedule to engage your audience and improve your SEO.

4. Functionality

• Form Testing: Regularly test all forms (like contact or signup forms) to make sure they’re working. Simply submit a test message to check that everything is functioning correctly.
• Cross-Browser Testing: Open your website in different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and on different devices (phones, tablets) to make sure it looks and works well everywhere.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check how your site performs on mobile devices.
• Error Log Review: Check your site’s error logs (available in your hosting control panel) to spot any recurring issues that need fixing. Install a redirection plugin to keep track of 404 errors and redirect old links.

5. Analytics & Monitoring

• Google Analytics Review: Log in to Google Analytics regularly to review how much traffic your site is getting, where visitors are coming from, and what they’re doing on your site. For instance, we once had a surge of visitors to the Artist Dynamix website coming in from Poland on. It turned out that this was spam and we were able to pick it up by looking at our Analytics reports.
• Uptime Monitoring: Use a service like UptimeRobot to monitor your site’s availability. It will alert you if your site goes down.
• SEO Ranking Monitoring: Use tools like the Jack Checker to test your SEO.
  Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track your keyword rankings and make adjustments to improve them. 
• User Experience (UX) Review: Collect feedback from users or use heatmap tools like Hotjar to see how people interact with your site, then make improvements based on what you learn.

6. Compliance & Legal

• Privacy Policy & Terms of Service: Make sure your privacy policy and terms of service are up to date with current laws, like GDPR.
• Cookie Consent Management: Make sure your site has a cookie consent banner that complies with regulations like GDPR. Tools like Cookiebot can help manage this.

7. Backup & Disaster Recovery

• Backup Verification: Periodically test your backups by restoring them to make sure they work as expected.
• Disaster Recovery Plan: Have a plan in place to quickly restore your site in case of a major issue. This includes knowing how to access your backups and who to contact if something goes wrong.

8. User Management

• User Account Review: Go through the list of users who have access to your site and remove any who no longer need access.
• Permissions Audit: Make sure that users only have access to the parts of your site that they need, reducing the risk of accidental changes or security issues.

9. Domain & Hosting

• Domain Renewal Check: Ensure that your domain name is set to auto-renew, so your site doesn’t go offline when your domain expires. You can check this in your domain registrar’s account.
• Hosting Renewal Check: Verify that your hosting plan is up to date and set to auto-renew, so your website stays online without interruption.

10. Regular Maintenance Schedule

• Monthly/Quarterly Maintenance: Set a regular schedule for performing all these tasks. Whether monthly or quarterly, regular maintenance helps catch issues before they become big problems.

Want to see how we approach website maintenance? We explain all the parts of our website maintenance packages on this page.