Essential Website Maintenance Tasks: How the Process Works

Like desert sands, the internet is constantly shifting. Not staying vigilant can leave your website sinking. Evolving cyber threats and changing search engine algorithms make website maintenance and management a necessity.

Without regular updates and security measures, your website is vulnerable to both cyberattacks and decreased search engine visibility. Neglecting maintenance services can lead to fewer visits, lost conversions, a tarnished reputation, and declining sales.

On the other hand, a well-maintained website improves the user experience, protects your brand reputation, and boosts search engine optimization, keeping your site secure and performing at its best. Here’s more on how website maintenance can drive business growth—and some essential tasks to keep your site up to date.

What is website maintenance?

Website maintenance means regularly monitoring your website’s performance, keeping it up to date with security measures, and ensuring optimal function to avoid issues. In other words, site maintenance is doing everything you can do to make your website run the way it’s supposed to. A website that fires on all cylinders can drive a positive user experience while increasing sales, brand loyalty, and customer engagement.

Website upkeep covers a range of maintenance tasks. One small example involves updating meta tags (snippets of text that describe a page’s content) for higher search engine rankings. A scheduled update to your content management system (CMS) is a larger task you might have to accomplish. This typically involves upgrading the core software that powers your website, requiring compatibility checks, template adjustments, and thorough testing to ensure everything works properly post-update.

Why is website maintenance so important?

Regular website management and maintenance is crucial to proper website function and supports business growth. Neglecting regular updates can lead to:

• Slower performance. Causes higher bounce rates and fewer repeat visits.
• Broken links. Frustrates visitors and sends them rushing for the exits.
• Lost leads. Outdated content or faulty functionality can turn potential customers off before they submit a contact form, for example.
• Security risks. Makes your site vulnerable to hacking, which can destroy brand reputation faster than you can say “malware.”

The benefits of regular website maintenance, however, are significant:

• Positive first impressions. A freshly updated, functional site can generate new leads. It makes a positive first impression, instilling trust in visitors and encouraging them to explore further and convert.
• Business reputation. Your website is the face of your brand online. Your reputation hangs on how well it serves your visitors and customers. A regular maintenance schedule can help ensure quality, reliability, and professionalism.
• SEO strategy. Regular website maintenance, which includes technical SEO audits, content updates, and link building, helps your site rank higher on search engines, boosting organic traffic and making it easier for potential customers to find you. On the other hand, neglecting SEO maintenance can lead to poor rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), less visibility, and less discovery.
• Sales. Companies with better customer experience (CX) outperform their competitors in terms of revenue growth, particularly in industries where customers can easily switch providers. Easy cart management and quick, secure payment processing ensure customers enjoy a hassle-free journey from product discovery to payment confirmation.
• Security. According to Pew Research Center, over half of Americans have avoided using a product or service due to privacy concerns. Regular website maintenance helps prevent security breaches and builds customer trust. For example, neglecting updates can lead to hackers stealing customers’ credit card info, damaging your reputation, and causing sales to plummet. A well-maintained site, on the other hand, reduces these risks and keeps customer trust intact.

How much does website maintenance cost?

Maintenance costs vary widely depending on your site’s specific needs. For small ecommerce businesses, basic updates and upkeep typically range from $40 to $500 per month. However, big ecommerce websites, with their added website development complexities like product catalogs, transactions, and customer data management demand more extensive maintenance and may cost thousands of dollars per month.

Several factors affect ecommerce website maintenance costs. A large ecommerce platform with multiple product categories, advanced filtering, personalized recommendations, multiple payment integrations, and inventory management will cost significantly more to upkeep than a small online store with only a few products.

If you lack technical expertise or resources, you can outsource the process to external web professionals who specialize in website maintenance services. Outsourced services for ecommerce businesses typically range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month, depending on the type and complexity of the website. Many tasks, like backups, security scans, software updates, and performance monitoring, can also be automated to save time and reduce costs.

Essential website maintenance tasks

1. Content updates
2. Security checks
3. Software updates
4. Backup and recovery
5. Broken links and error checking
6. Mobile responsiveness
7. Performance optimization
8. Database optimization
9. Spam management
10. Form testing
11. Cross-browser compatibility testing
12. Legal compliance

To ensure your site is in tip-top shape, adopt a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance plan. Here are a few regular tasks you can keep in rotation:

1. Content updates

Update or remove outdated and inaccurate website content on a daily or weekly basis to keep your website brimming with engaging, accurate content. Pay special attention to news, blog posts, and ecommerce site product descriptions, which can quickly become outdated.

2. Security checks

Protecting sensitive information is an everyday task, as new security breaches could prove disastrous to site uptime, usability, and, worst of all, customer trust. Protect your database from unauthorized access and data breaches.

Perform regular security updates to identify and address potential security threats, like malware, phishing attacks, and data breaches. Implement security patches (fixes for software vulnerabilities), strong passwords, access controls, and monitor for suspicious activity—unusual login attempts, unexpected changes to website files, or spikes in traffic from unfamiliar locations. Responding quickly to threats helps to maintain a secure website.

3. Software updates

If your site’s foundation is a content management system (CMS), keep the theme, plug-ins, and other software up to date to preserve website security and ensure compatibility by regularly checking for updates within your CMS dashboard and installing them promptly after testing. Check for updates weekly.

4. Backup and recovery

Regularly back up website data and files to protect against data loss from server crashes, hacking attempts, or accidental deletion. Check to see that your hosting service provider performs daily backups.

5. Broken links and error checking

Scan your website on a daily or weekly basis for indications of broken links, such as 404 “Page not found” errors and other issues that can negatively impact user experience and the website’s SEO.

A simple way to do this is by using a website crawler tool (free and paid options are available online) that automatically scans your site and reports any broken links or other errors. Fixing broken links by replacing them with correct, active URLs allows visitors to navigate web pages without dead ends.

6. Mobile responsiveness

Your website must be mobile responsive, meaning it automatically adjusts its layout and design to fit any screen size. More than half of web traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices, so responsive design principles will enable your website to adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes. For example, text might resize, images might rescale, and menus might collapse into a hamburger icon on mobile devices for optimal viewing.

7. Performance optimization

Monitor overall website performance metrics, like page load times and mobile responsiveness, and implement optimization strategies, like image compression and removing unnecessary characters from source code without affecting its functionality, to enhance site speed and user experience.

For example, a content delivery network (CDN) can improve loading times because it distributes website content across a network of servers geographically closer to the site users.

8. Database optimization

Optimize databases to make sure that data retrieval is functioning properly:

• Use monitoring tools. Tools like Shopify Analytics, various Shopify apps, SolarWinds database performance monitor, and Datadog can all track key metrics such as query execution time, CPU usage, and memory consumption.
• Identify bottlenecks. Pinpoint the slow areas in your database. Make sure your database searches only retrieve the information needed to speed things up.
• Analyze indexes. This allows the database to locate specific data quickly. Too many indexes can be counterproductive, actually slowing down write operations. (Think of them like an index in a book: Rather than having to read the entire book to find a specific topic, you can just look at the index to quickly locate the page numbers associated with that topic.)
• Assess server horsepower. CPU, memory, and disk space—is it enough to manage your website’s traffic and data volume? You can gauge this by monitoring server performance metrics (e.g., CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O) during peak traffic times. If server capacity is consistently exceeded, you may need to upgrade server resources.
• Defragment data. Keep the database humming smoothly by archiving old, infrequently accessed data to reduce its overall size. Defragmenting rearranges the data, putting related pieces closer together, which helps the database access information more efficiently.
• Use data caching mechanisms. Store frequently accessed data in memory so everything loads faster. Data caching is like creating a shortcut for frequently accessed data. It stores a copy of that data in a faster, more readily accessible location, like the server’s memory. The server can then pull data from the cache much more quickly, which improves website performance.

9. Spam management

Irrelevant and malicious comments from blogs, social media posts, or product reviews written by bots and trolls are the antithesis of user-friendly UX. They undermine the user experience and damage your credibility. Sweep out spam comments sections to preserve site integrity and protect users from harmful links or phishing scams. You can also use manual or automated spam filters to sanitize the comments.

10. Form testing

Verify that all contact forms and interactive web elements are working to allow visitors to easily connect, submit inquiries, or complete desired actions without stumbling into errors or technical issues. Check processes for data submission and storage and test forms to confirm that automated responses or notifications are being sent correctly.

11. Cross-browser compatibility testing

Test all aspects of your website in common browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge—on desktop and mobile. Verify that all elements render and perform as expected. By addressing inconsistencies, you can maximize reach and minimize user frustrations.

12. Legal compliance

Comply with legal requirements such as privacy policies, terms of service, and accessibility standards. Relevant laws and regulations are subject to change, so periodically check and update privacy policies that clearly explain data collection practices and terms of service that outline website usage guidelines. Finally, review and revise website accessibility policies for individuals with disabilities as needed.

Tracking and analytics

After your maintenance plan is in place, continuously track your site performance by monitoring website analytics. Gather insights about site visitors’ behavior, traffic sources, and overall website performance. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for this. Key website performance metrics to track include:

• Traffic. The number of site visitors is a key indicator of online reach and engagement.
• Bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one web page.
• Page views. The number of times a page was visited.
• Engagement. The number of likes, mentions, and shares quantifies audience engagement with your content and brand, revealing the level of interest and potential for brand advocacy.
• Conversion rates. Conversion rate is the percentage of leads who complete a desired action, like making a purchase or filling out a form.
• Return on Investment (ROI). ROI looks at how effectively web maintenance efforts like performance improvements and enhanced security are contributing to business goals, measured as conversions, reduced downtime, and customer satisfaction, relative to the cost of the maintenance itself.

Website maintenance frequency

The frequency of maintenance required depends on your site’s complexity and purpose:

• Daily and/or weekly. Check for errors, run backups, update software, verify forms, remove spam, and check for broken links.
• Monthly. Gauge the website speed, review security scans, analyze website statistics, review legal requirements, and update old content.
• Quarterly. Review design, update images, optimize SEO, test forms, and check mobile responsiveness.
• Annually. Update copyright information, review content accuracy, renew domain name, and schedule design updates.