Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance

Website maintenance is a must for your site to be successful. While famously simple to use, maintaining your WordPress site is crucial. After all, your goal is promote a positive online image of your business to attract new customers and retain current ones.

The first and most important is that content be fresh and original. In addition to being essential to the search visibility of your site and your rank in SEO terms, it is easily recognized by your site’s readers. At a minimum, you need to ensure that the content of the site is accurate and updated regularly. Most information becomes out of date and its important to show your visitors that you’re on top of the subject.

Your online content needs to be maintained in several other respects.

One of the key maintenance tasks is copy editing for spelling, grammatical and other authoring errors. Another is link checking and repair. This is the minimum for ensuring that your content is working.

Check if the content that you are about to use for your website is 100% unique. Plagiarism is copying content from another site or source, without citation.

The next level is the use of HTML. You want to use elements correctly, validate to the result and perform basic on-page search engine optimization.

Then we move on to the legibility of your content to check that it is readable, usable and accessible.

Checking the download speed of a typical page is important because we know visitors won’t wait if your content isn’t optimized and cached appropriately.

Does your site has two live versions being indexed? If you can visit a site using both the HTTP and HTTPS protocol, then the site’s page rank may be impacted. There’s a straightforward fix.

Other aspects to maintain are what’s turned off some page elements for mobile (e.g., most sliders) and cross-browser compatibility (that it works on Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox and so on. With responsive design and the rapid rise in mobile, these become more important than ever to reach and stay on top.

The bottom line in content maintenance is understanding what works and what doesn’t. Not only does this result in higher quality content, it fuels both content planning and promotion.

Learn what it takes to run your website like a finely tuned machine. Make the call today.