Website Maintenance Checklist

3 min read

Regular website maintenance ensures your site stays fast, secure, and reliable. Follow our comprehensive checklist, organized by monthly, quarterly, and yearly tasks, to keep your website in top condition year-round.

Regular website maintenance is crucial to keep your site running smoothly, ensuring a positive user experience. At Elev8 Web Studio, we specialize in building, maintaining and optimizing WordPress sites and have compiled this comprehensive checklist to help you keep your website in top shape all year round.

Monthly Tasks

1. Check for Broken Links and Errors

Broken Link Check: Use tools like Broken Link Checker to identify and fix any broken links on your site. Broken links can harm your SEO and frustrate visitors.
404 Errors: Monitor 404 errors by using website analytics tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console. Once you’ve identified issues, resolve them by updating or removing the problematic link.
Also, ensure your website has a custom 404 page that provides helpful information and links to guide users back to relevant content.

2. Update Themes and Plugins

WordPress Core: Ensure your WordPress core is updated to the latest version for improved security and performance.
Themes and Plugins: Update all themes and plugins to their latest versions. Outdated plugins can be a significant security risk.
Monthly Maintenance: If you’re not already hosting your website with Elev8, consider our Managed Hosting service, where we handle all these updates and more on a monthly basis, ensuring your site is always up-to-date and secure.

Quarterly Tasks

1. Clean and Organize Your Image Library

Image Cleanup: Review your media library and delete any unused or outdated images. We recommend using the Media Cleaner plugin to automate this process.
Organize Files: Create folders or categories to organize your images, making it easier to find what you need quickly. The Media Library Folders plugin is a great tool for this task.
Optimize Images: Ensure all images are compressed and optimized for faster loading without compromising quality. Use the Smush plugin to automatically compress and optimize your images.

2. Review Roles and Permissions

User Roles and Permissions: Review your WordPress user accounts. Do any accounts need to be removed? Does each user have appropriate level of access relative to their job function or role?

3. Improve SEO & Accessibility

Content Optimization: Ensure all your content is optimized for relevant keywords. Update titles, meta descriptions, and headers to improve search engine visibility. We recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin for comprehensive SEO management.
Internal Linking: Review and enhance your internal linking strategy to help search engines understand the structure and importance of your content.
Alt Text for Images: Make sure all images have descriptive alt text to improve accessibility and SEO.
Local SEO: If applicable, optimize your site for local search results by ensuring your business information is accurate and consistent across all online directories. The Yoast Local SEO plugin can help with this.
Color Contrast: Check that your website’s colour contrast meets accessibility standards, ensuring text is readable against background colours. Tools like Google’s Lighthouse Report or WebAIM’s Contrast Checker can help you identify colour combinations that do not meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Video and Audio Content: Provide transcripts for audio content and captions for video content to make them accessible to all users.

4. Enhance User Experience

Navigation: Review your site’s navigation for ease of use. Simplify menus and ensure important information is easily accessible.
Forms and CTAs: Test all forms and calls to action (CTAs) to ensure they are working correctly and effectively capturing leads. The WPForms plugin is a great tool for creating and managing forms.

Yearly Tasks

1. Comprehensive Review

Full Website Audit: Conduct a comprehensive audit of your website to assess its overall performance, including Accessibility, SEO, and User Experience (UX).
Redesign Considerations: Evaluate if your website design needs a refresh based on current trends and user feedback.
Policy Updates: Review and update your website’s privacy policy, terms of service, and other legal documents to ensure compliance with current regulations.

Conclusion

Maintaining your website is crucial to providing a positive user experience and achieving your business goals. By following this website maintenance checklist, you can ensure your site remains in top condition throughout the year. If you need assistance with any of these tasks or want to learn more about our monthly maintenance services, contact Elev8 Web Studio today!

Keep Your Website in Top Shape Year-Round

Regular maintenance is essential for a fast, secure, and user-friendly website. Let Elev8 Web Studio handle the hard work for you. Our monthly maintenance services ensure your site is always up-to-date and performing at its best. Contact us today to learn more!

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About the Author

Renee Pomerleau is an experienced design and UX professional focused on humanizing technology to improve the world around us.