Every website owner has a responsibility to ensure the following things are checked on a weekly basis, to ensure the website is in full working order and you are – or your business is – benefiting fully from the investment you made when you had the website built in the first place.
Contact Forms – This is the NUMBER ONE THING you need to check regularly, as there are so many things at play here that can affect them. Website modules can be updated which can break functionality, email providers can change their authentication requirements which can stop the notifications from arriving in your inbox, etc etc.
Send yourself a test at least once a week and ensure you send it from a NON domain email. EG if your website is applesandpears.com then dont use info@applesandpears.com as the test email address as it can create a loop that email providers dont like. Use a hotmail, gmail or other personal email address when filling out the form to test.
Checkout – If your website is an online store then checking people can actually buy things is a MUST. Again, there are so many things that can change behind the scenes that can stop a website checkout from functioning, payment gateways, random website modules, 3rd party shipping extensions, and more. If you notice a lack of orders or are concerned there may be a problem, then run through a full test from start to finish and buy something yourself – you can always refund it afterwards, and it will give you peace of mind that things are all functioning correctly.
Signups – If your website is membership based or requires users to sign up, then its important to check the signup process works nice and smoothly on a regular basis. A lot of websites are made using platforms like WordPress, and WP and its related plugins all get updated regularly and can fall out of sync with each other. Ensuring this process works flawlessly means that your signups should remain nice and consistent.
Mobiles – All websites look and work slightly different on mobile devices, and often the mobile views have different stylesheets and sometimes different modules too. This means that even if your website works perfectly on a laptop or desktop PC, there may be things that cause mobile users to not have the best experience on there. Additionally, the majority of users now access the web using their mobiles, so ensuring the mobile version of your website is fully working is a vital check you should make on a weekly basis.
And finally, the General Navigation and UX – browse your website, click links, buttons and ensure the pages link correctly and that things are easy to find. I happed to visit a client website the other day and they had been editing pages themselves, which is fine and is something we encourage. However, unbeknown to them they had changes the page URLS which had then meant some banners on the homepage no longer linked anywhere. This meant there were dead links from their homepage, and Google doesn’t like this.
We offer weekly and monthly maintenance for all websites, specifically WordPress and Opencart websites but due to our extensive knowledge of almost all website platforms we can can cover pretty much anything – so if you havent got time to do weekly checks and would like the peace of mind that the above things (and more) are being taken care of for you, then get in touch today to discuss maintenance retainers.
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