Having a great website is vital for any business these days. It should be one of your first considerations when you’re starting a new business. Unfortunately, the website can often be neglected once it has already been built. You’ve spent a lot of money on a good developer and they’ve created a user-friendly, interesting site for you. That’s fine for a few months, but if you don’t maintain it then it will end up being difficult to use and people won’t keep coming back if there’s nothing new on there. Website maintenance might seem like a bit of a chore but it really isn’t. As long as you keep on top of it, you won’t have to spend much time on it. The key is to do little but often, rather than letting things get bad and spending days trying to sort it out. If you’ve been putting off website maintenance, follow these simple steps and you can get a handle on things again.

Update Content

If a customer comes to your site and reads an interesting article, they’ll be likely to come back. They are going to be put off if they revisit you a week later and there isn’t anything new on there. The more forgiving amongst us might give you one more chance, but beyond that, they’ll find somewhere else. You need to make sure that you are putting out good quality content on a regular basis to make sure people have a reason to visit you again. Editing is also key. Content that is riddled with spelling mistakes will be a big turn off and it only takes a few minutes to check through posts before you upload them. Don’t lose customers to laziness.

Test In New Browsers

New browsers are released all the time and they all work slightly differently. Every time a new one comes out, spend half an hour browsing your website to make sure that it functions as it should do. If a new browser becomes very popular and your site doesn’t work on it, then that is a lot of potential customers that you will be putting off. Finding anything that doesn’t work and correcting it with each update will be much quicker than trying to rewrite the whole site a few years down the line.

Check For Errors Regularly

If anything does go wrong, you need to find out straightaway so you minimize the number of people that have had a bad experience on your site. People are fickle, and a few broken links are enough to ensure they don’t use your website again. Try enabling custom errors that will automatically tell you if there is a problem with the code as soon as it arises. That way you can fix it before anybody has even seen it.

Icons And Images

The aesthetic of your website is the thing that is most likely to draw people in, so it is imperative that you make sure that all of your images and icons are working properly. A blank white space on your homepage makes your website, and in turn, your business look incredibly unprofessional.

It only takes a few hours a week to do all of these things, so there’s no excuse for letting your website get out of date.