Maintain Your Website’s Health With These Checkpoints

website health checklist that your web developer can follow
website health checklist that your web developer can follow

Security Measures

  • Regular Software Updates: If you want to keep your website healthy, make sure that the core software of your website is always up to date. Additionally, the theme of your website and all its plugins must always be updated too.
  • SSL Certificate: Check with your web hosting or your web developer whether your website is running on SSL or not. Your developer must also make sure that every page of your website is running on SSL, not just the homepage.  
  • SSL Certificate Renewal: Check with your web hosting every year to renew your website’s SSL certificate on time. SSL is important for a website to be healthy.
  • Firewall Configuration: Ask your web hosting company to activate the firewall on your server. Alternatively, your web developer can also install a plugin to make sure that your website is running on a firewall.
  • User Authentication Checks: Ask your website developer to regularly review and update user access permissions and authentication.

Website Performance Optimization

  • Performance Monitoring: There are many online tools (free & paid) such as Site24X7.com that you can subscribe to and get a notification when your website is down so that you can contact your web developer to fix it.
  • Caching Mechanism: A healthy website would always have a caching mechanism in place to reduce server load and enhance website speed. If your website is not having a caching plugin or module, check with your website builder to do it for you. If you are using WordPress, you can use a free plugin like ‘WP Fastest Cache‘.
  • Mobile-Friendly Testing: Having a responsive website is more of a necessity now. It is therefore recommended to test your website regularly for its responsiveness. Check your website’s responsiveness with the help of a tool like Browserstack.com
  • Content Delivery Optimization: To keep your website healthy, you must implement techniques like lazy loading for images to reduce bandwidth usage.
  • Page Speed Optimization: Ask your web developer to optimize website performance by compressing images and minifying JS/CSS codes to enhance its loading speed and overall health.

Maintenance Checks

  • Database Maintenance: It’s critical to regularly optimize/clean up your website’s database. Fortunately, if your website is developed using WordPress, there are a few great plugins that you can integrate with your website to optimize the database.
  • 404 Error Monitoring: There are many tools and plugins that you or your developer can use to monitor 404 pages or broken links on your website. These tools help you fix the broken links on your site and keep it healthy.
  • Robot.txt and Sitemap Updates: Robot.txt file guides search engine crawlers efficiently. Make sure that you use it effectively for your website’s SEO health. You can use ‘Yoast SEO‘ plugin to automatically update your website’s XML sitemap.  
  • Code Review and Cleanup: Hiring a professional web developer can help you in many ways like reviewing the outdated codes on your website and cleaning up the obsolete codes or scripts from your site.  

SEO Best Practices

  • Meta Tags and Descriptions: Using optimized meta tags on your website helps you to gain visibility on search engines like Google.
  • Link Checking: Interlinking web pages logically & efficiently is important for your website’s SEO health.
  • Image Optimization: By optimizing the images on your website, you can reduce their sizes and ensure the better performance and health of your website.
  • Fresh Content: Updating your website with fresh content regularly is important for the health of your website’s SEO. 

User Experience Enhancements

  • Responsive Design: Maintain a responsive design to ensure a seamless experience across various devices and screen sizes. Responsive web design is good not only for the best user experience but also for great search engine rankings.
  • Navigation Management: Another important thing to take care of your website’s health is to make sure that its navigation menu is always up to date and has no outdated links.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility: With the changes in plugins, themes, or PHP versions, your website may lose its responsiveness. Therefore, you must regularly test your website on different browsers to ensure consistent performance. You can check online the browser compatibility of your website with a website like Browserstack.com 

Miscellaneous Maintenance Tasks

  • DNS and Domain Management: Regularly, you need to ensure that your domain renewals are done on time so that you don’t lose it. Also, you need to make sure that your domain is pointing to the correct/accurate DNS.
  • Legal Compliance: Ensure your website complies with relevant laws and regulations, such as GDPR.
  • Spam Prevention: Preventing your website from spam is another important item that you need to make sure of to keep your website healthier.
  • Regular Backups: Last but not least, you must ensure that you take regular backups of your website so that you can restore it in case of data loss or unpredictable issues on your server.

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