5 Website Management To-dos You Must Get Done

Your to-do list for the day (and every day) is a mile long, and once you get through all the crucial items and have finished putting out fires, there are a few things left at the bottom of the list that keep getting moved to the next day and the next day and the next day….

Many times, these items at the bottom of the list are the things you don’t want to do or don’t really know how to do.

Often these are website-related tasks. Websites are so prevalent in our society today, but not many people really know how to properly and efficiently manage them.

Managing Your Website When You Don’t Have Extra Time

Being efficient with your time and resources is the answer, but one that can be challenging.  You know you need to maintain your website, but maintenance tasks are boring. Or if it’s outside of your skill set, it can be daunting.

Still, there are important tasks that must be addressed to keep your website up and running.

Here are 5 Website Management Todos You Must Get Done:

1. Site monitoring. If you don’t have proper site monitoring in place, it’s just a matter of time before your website is hacked. If that does happen, you will spend hours, days or even weeks trying to get the site back up and running properly again. That is not efficient. Site monitoring with plugins like Wordfence is critically important to making sure hackers, spammers and others who would do your website harm are not trying to log in and cause trouble.

2. Back-ups. This is another layer of security that you absolutely need to have. Whether it’s getting hacked or a member of your team accidentally deleting or changing things on your site, you need regular back-ups to ensure you can get things restored as quickly and efficiently as possible. BackupBuddy is another great plugin option for this.

3. Maintenance updates. This includes tasks such as updating themes, plugins and new versions of software. It doesn’t usually take long to do, but it is possible for things to go wrong if you aren’t familiar with this process.

4. Edits and updates. You start getting into some of the more small but time consuming tasks with this one. New staff members who need bios, a change in contact info, a new banner or landing page, new blog posts or fresh content for pages. Most people are capable of doing some of these things but don’t have the time or desire. Visual Composer is a great plugin that allows you to use a drag and drop tool instead of code to make updates, but the work still has to be done.

5. Split testing. You may be familiar with this by the name of A/B testing, and basically it’s trying a couple of different options on your website to see what works best. It may mean creating two versions of a landing page and putting one up for a while then the other to see which ones gets the most conversions. It can be technical and time consuming, but the data you get is invaluable, as long as you know how to interpret it. We like Visual Website Optimizer for this.

Better Focus, or Better Delegation

None of this is rocket science and much of it can be done without a high level knowledge of websites or coding.

Everyone needs a website these days, but to make one and keep it running well takes significant time, thought and effort.

Managing things efficiently is the key.

(And having a little help from a webmaster like the ones you’ll find at Render may be the perfect solution for you.)

Question: When was the last time you did your website maintenance? Is it time to delegate the task to Render? You can leave a comment by clicking here.