Have a newly designed Website? Three Steps to keep it Fresh

A Well Maintained Car is like A Well Maintained Website

Imagine, you are the proud owner of a new car, fresh out of the showroom. The car looks beautiful, all shiny and new. And everybody compliments you on it.

But what about a year later? Unless you have been following the proper maintenance schedules, filling the right octane gasoline, your car will soon start to lose it’s luster. Pretty soon your car may stop performing. And one day it might just stop running.

A new website is rather like a new car. It has to be regularly maintained. Or all the hard work that you and your designer put in to create the perfect website could get wasted.

Here are three steps that will prevent that from happening:

1. Regularly add new content
2. Take regular backups
3. Upgrade WordPress and the plugins

Let’s look a little closely at how each step will keep your website running smoothly.

Step 1: Regularly add content

Content is King or so the saying goes. But what does that mean? It simply means that by providing regular valuable and helpful content to your visitors, they will keep coming back for more. This in turn will lead to more sales. Additionally search engines love websites that are regularly updated. And a regularly updated website will rank much higher in search results.

Grace created a fantastic ‘Weight Loss’ website and initially she put in lot of great quality articles. Google loved her and her website ranked very high on the results page. Her visitors were also impressed and kept coming back for more information.

But as the months passed Grace got busy elsewhere and stopped adding new content. Google stopped ranking her website on the first page. And her visitors stopped returning. One day, she decided to suddenly add a whole lot of content at one go. But that didn’t help much. By then, her visitors had forgotten about her website.

Your visitors need to regularly find new content. Only then will they remember your website and keep coming back for more.

But what if you are very good at regularly adding new content, have you been backing it up?

Step 2: Take Regular Backups

While adding content is very important. It is equally important to take regular backups. How regular, depends on how often you update your content. Make sure you create a backup schedule and if possible automate it. Check out my article, to learn more on backup plans and strategies.

Grace was now regularly adding content to her website. Her website traffic was up and people looked forward to reading her content. Then the unexpected happened, her website was hacked and went down. No problemo for Grace. Thankfully, Grace had been taking regular backups. In next to no time her site was back online. And her visitors were none the wiser.

But what if she did not have a backup to fallback on? Or she had a very old backup. All her content would have been lost. And worse still she could lose all her readers who regularly consumed her content. No one wants to go back to square one!

Your website getting hacked is a very real problem. But this can be mitigated.

Step 3: Upgrade WordPress and the plugins regularly

Plugins and WordPress constantly put out new versions. These could be due to advances in their software or because of some security issues.

Upgrading to the latest releases is essential in ensuring your website is better protected. Grace’s website may not have been hacked if WordPress and the plugins were up to date.

Note: Before updating WordPress and the plugins, make sure to take a complete Backup.

What if I have no time to do all this?

If you are using your website just as a web presence (more like a business card on the web) you might be able to get away with avoiding all the steps described above (might being the keyword).

However, if your website has to work for you then you either have to make the time or hire someone who will do the job. Not doing anything will just lead to an under performing website, like that new car not being maintained.

Before I end let’s take a look at what a lot of small business owners don’t realize.

A Common Mistake

Getting your website professionally created is great. But that does not mean that you, as a small business owner do not have to learn the basics of WordPress. Without this knowledge simple tasks like posting a new article or taking a backup will seem overwhelming. Learning even just the basics of WordPress will put you in the drivers seat of your website.

So to recap..

It is easy to keep your website performing like that new car. Just by regularly adding content, taking backups and upgrading WordPress, you will have your website purring.

Are you unsure on how to add and update content to your website? Don’t Worry, it is fairly easy. Don’t hesitate to Contact Me. I will be more than happy to answer your questions.