04/17/2022
WEBSITE MAINTENANCE
What is Website Maintenance, and why is it important for an experienced Webmaster to perform its required tasks?
Website maintenance is the process of periodically monitoring a website and performing various required tasks to keep the website functioning securely, properly and as efficiently as possible.
WHAT IN THE WORLD DOES ALL THAT MEAN?
Let's start with the concept of 'periodically monitoring a website'. As a website exists over periods of time; specifically, weeks, months and years, your webmaster monitors your entire website. He/she is constantly testing various aspects of your website to be sure it is doing what it was intended to do. Your website should load as quickly as possible, and its visitors should be able to easily locate any and all of its contents with ease.
In addition, there are areas of your website that a webmaster pays specific attention to: security, the relevancy of your content for its target audience, the design of your website, search engine optimization, and how well your website functions and performs - not necessarily in the listed order.
Imagine, for a moment, that you just purchased a brand new vehicle right off of the showroom floor. Your new vehicle has that new car smell, and drives and rides almost like you are floating on air. You play with every button and lever - everything works perfectly.
As time passes, you require an oil change, and/or you need new tires. It could be a rainy afternoon, and while your wipers are operating, the edge of the rubber of one of your wipers partially peels off its base. Did I mention that the dysfunctional wiper is on the drivers side? Then there's the ultimate issue that can, and eventually will occur, your check engine light comes on.
A website doesn't have a check engine light to signal that issues have developed. Your website may start to take longer than normal to load in a visitors browser; an image may malfunction and a broken image icon will be in its place, or there could be a link a visitor clicks on that no longer works. Your webmaster regularly looks for these types of dysfunctions and corrects the issues immediately.
On the backend of your website, the area of your website that can't be seen by a visitor, your website 'engine' if you will, your webmaster 'performs various required tasks'. For example, for websites created utilizing a Content Management System, WordPress for example, the software developers are constantly providing updates, usually security related, that must be applied as soon as possible to help prevent your website from being compromised by hackers and spammers.
Without the constant monitoring of your website by a website maintenance professional, eventually your website will start to have visual issues, and in the long run, stop working completely.
Who does your website maintenance?
I hope you have found this information informative and enlightening.
Next time, we will take a look at Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a. SEO.
Thank you.....Cg