Website Maintenance: Simple and Quick Steps to Tune Up Your Web Site

Keeping your website free of problems not only helps in better search engine visibility and make your visitors happy but also saves you from performance issues.

Some simple web site maintenance steps can save a lot of your time that you might have otherwise spent in checking your website for potential problems. Once the problem is isolated, it’s easy to fix it.

Check for Broken/Dead Links

It is a good practice to check all the links in your web site(s) for broken or dead links. Pages with links to external sites are the ones which needs more attention. As soon as the link on the external website changes, your link becomes dead. Visitors do not go anywhere with those links which is annoying to them. To overcome these issues, you should check your entire site for broken or dead links using simple and fully automated tools such as W3C Link Checker. The tool is free and well documented. I advise you to setup a monthly checkup schedule to check your website with this tool.

Check your web site in different browsers

Most of us use the latest version of current browser or keep upgrading the browser to the latest version, but the website design remains intact. If your website was designed at least an year ago, then you should give it a try to open the web site in different browsers and check the appearance. You can take help of your friends too! Whenever there is a new browser released in the market or a major browser upgrade is announced, and when majority of people may start using it, better would be to test your web site in that browser and pro actively detect potential problems. You can also use a free service from AnyBrowser.com for this purpose.

Check your HTML and CSS

Validating and checking your HTML for standards is very easy with W3C HTML validation Service. The tool will check your HTML and return problems, if any found. If your web site uses CSS, then using W3C CSS Validator is worth a try. It will check your CSS and report any potential compatibility problems or misuses of syntaxes. very helpful indeed!

Check those forms

If your website has forms, you must check to see if they still work. If you have not received any emails from those forms since long, then it’s time to check them once. Fill in information as a user would and submit it. If you receive an email notification, then you are all set.

Run Spell Check

With almost every search engine suggesting the correct spelling if you misspelled a word in the search string, it’s a good practice to check the pages in your website for spelling mistakes. When the pages from your website are indexed in search engines with wrong spellings, chances are rare that visitors will ever see your website in search results. Spell check your pages before they go online and if they are already online use NetMechanic - Spell Check instead.

Monitor your website

If you run a sales or an e-commerce site, downtime may prove to be very costly at times. It’s simple and quick to setup monitoring for your website. Some services offer customized monitoring as per your needs. You may wish to monitor some specific port or just the web and mail service on your website. It’s in fact much easier and painless to monitor your web site 24/7 than what you think.