As much as your webmaster may protest, your website probably doesn’t need constant attention. Unless it’s a complex e-commerce site, or relates to ever-changing trends or events, it probably just needs an expert eye over it at regular intervals, to ensure it’s in good health and doing what you ask of it.
Website maintenance can easily become a long list of jobs that sound important or seem productive, but don’t really make your website proportionately safer, more useful or more effective. Expert and layperson opinions on what you simply must test, update, safeguard, optimise, tweak, delete, back up… seem to change daily, and can make your head spin. And these opinions seem to change every time you look into it.
So what should you really be looking at?
At Stylistic, we don’t pretend to know everything. But over many years, we’ve identified five things you need to keep an eye on – and five you needn’t worry about nearly as much as some would have you believe.
Five things that matter.
1. Keep it secure.
First, make sure the software behind your website is up to date. With most providers, you’ll be prompted by email, with a link straight to where you need to do it, as it’s in their interests to look after you. It’s wise to do it as soon as you can, as these updates are typically created in response to (and protection against) evolving security weaknesses or potential threats. It protects your website platform and any plugins or extensions it uses, prevents data loss or theft, and means you stay online and avoid losing customers or users. Ultimately, it avoids things getting expensive and complicated.
2. Back everything up.
A comprehensive backup gives you a copy of your entire website – as it was before things went weird or disappeared, were compromised, or simply stopped working. The UK Government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is part of GCHQ, and recommends businesses make incremental backups and check that they can actually be restored in full, quickly, when things are back to normal.2 Many brands and businesses – even individuals – back up to both a cloud service and in-house storage hardware, just to be sure they don’t lose assets.
3. Check the things your customers use.
Your website might look perfectly fine to you, but it’s wise to check features that your customers might be having problems with, that you tend not to use, or click on. Check embedded links, contact buttons and enquiry form fields… anything that might be affecting user experience, or preventing engagement or navigation. Your user won’t let you know… they’ll just go somewhere else.
Also, check your responsive web design (RWD) to ensure everything looks and feels the same across desktop, smartphone and tablet, and zooms and scrolls smoothly.
4. Keep an eye on performance itself – not just your scores.
Nobody enjoys waiting for a slow website, and potential customers will wander off if you don’t present yourself quickly! Performance matters, particularly on mobile. You may come across terms such as Core Web Vitals, which are simply Google’s measures of loading speed, responsiveness, and how stable a page feels while it loads. They’re useful indicators, but they’re not the whole story, so be your own customer and see how you’d feel if you ended up on your website.
Meanwhile, SEO. It’s a good basic tool for getting people to your site, and to specific pages, but don’t overdo it at the expense of readability and clarity. Even Google advises against chasing a perfect SEO score.1
5. Keeping content accurate, useful and relevant.
Your website should reflect who you are today, and what you mean to your customers, right now. This covers everything from checking contact details, services and products, to articles, observations, even look and feel. A peek at which pages people visit most, how long they spend there and when they leave, can tell you a lot – and inform how you make things easier or more compelling for them.
Oh, and review your search performance, too!
This is the broader approach we take at Stylistic, with our Digital Health Check. It looks at your website in terms of SEO, content, social media and the wider digital picture. It’s a great overview of what’s working, what isn’t working as it should or could, and where the most powerful improvements can be achieved.
Five things that tend to matter a whole lot less.
We won’t dwell on these, but if you’re allocating significant budget and resources to any of them, it might be worth reconsidering…
1. Chasing a perfect technical score.
A score of 100 might look impressive, but it doesn’t mean you have a brilliant website – it covers some considerations, but by no means all.
2. Updating everything, all the time.
Updates matter when they address security, compatibility, or achieve genuine, noticeable improvements for your users or visitors. Installing updates as soon as they’re available, or interim updates before a bigger one comes along, can sometimes cause problems.
3. Adding features because they look clever.
Animations, sliders, pop-ups and other features can have their place. But if they don’t help your visitor find what they’re looking for, or do something more easily, they’re probably not helping much.
4. Checking analytics without a purpose.
Website statistics are useful when they answer a question or identify/solve a problem. Constantly watching numbers without knowing what you’re looking for rarely leads to better decisions (and can drive you mad).
5. Prioritising cosmetic changes.
Refreshing a colour or changing an image can be worthwhile. But if your enquiry form isn’t working, your website is insecure or your key content is out of date, those jobs should come first.
Good maintenance often means knowing not just what to do – but what not to do
This is where an experienced expert can save you a lot of time and money.
You don’t need someone constantly searching for problems to solve, or things to change. You need someone who can look at your website objectively, understand what you’re trying to achieve, and tell you in simple terms what matters, and what doesn’t.
That might mean fixing something immediately. It might mean keeping an eye on it. Or it might mean leaving it alone.
Good website maintenance isn’t about doing more.
It’s about doing the things that make a positive difference.
1. coredna.com/blogs/how-lighthouse-score-affect-seo
2. ncsc.gov.uk
