Aftercare of a website
After you have put your website live then of course you may think that your work is done. However, nothing could be further from the truth. A website always requires attention, with installing updates, creating new content, and keeping up with mundane website things like replying to emails. In this article, we'll cover everything that comes after putting a website live. Let's get started!
A website is easy to make these days, however, there is often a lot of work involved before you have it to your satisfaction. Content Management Systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Umbraco make it easy to create and maintain a website. But you're not done with this once you hit publish. There are a number of ongoing issues that you need to keep track of.
Updates to the underlying technology of a website
A website is created in a certain version of software, this is the code language such as PHP, ASP.NET and HTML / CSS / Javascript. All these things are susceptible to updates that come out for this. It's up to you as webmaster to update and modify these where necessary. With outdated software versions there are risks on your website. Leaks occur and are fixed in updates, and usually the speed or efficiency is improved. So in almost every case it is advisable to install updates in a timely manner. Always do this in a safe way though by setting up backups of the hosting space first. This ensures that when an erroneous update is installed you can quickly go back to a working installation. More about this later in this article.
Publish fresh content once in a while
It is also important to publish new content once in a while. How often? Every day is best. But of course, not everyone can do that. Often there is a guideline of once a week to publish new content in the form of a blog post, a new page or product or an action on social media. The more often you publish the more likely you are to rank for various issues and keywords in search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing.
New content on your website can also be found more easily on social media sites, provided of course that you publish it there. Here you can think of a large number of websites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. There are now many different social networks, and it's up to you as webmaster to find out what your target audience uses the most, and then capitalize on it. However, social media is not a short-term success as you might think. The posts or media that go viral is only a small portion of all the content. Most of the content that you will publish especially in the beginning will get little attention. That's just the reality, since all companies are also on this and have been doing it more often than you with existing audiences.
A blog post is often still one of the most used methods to acquire new customers through content marketing. What constitutes a second way is by creating a landing page on which you highlight your product or service. And then rank as high as possible with this landing page in the natural search results. In the paid advertisements and promoting this page on social media. Of course, there are other methods to put your content first, but these are the most common methods to ensure that your website gets the best results.
Setting up and maintaining backups
Backing up your website is a necessary thing that comes up again and again, and needs to be maintained. To backup your website you can do this manually every time, but you can also easily set up a scheduled task that does this for you. Or if you have a Content Management System such as WordPress you can easily have this done by a plugin. Please note that backups also take up space on your hosting package. And if they are set up in the wrong way they can cause exponential growth. So it is important that you check and clean this on a periodic basis. For example, by putting this on your agenda once a month. Remove the unnecessary backups from the hosting space and check the function of the website. Furthermore you can also store the backups on a second and third location. For example, by leaving one on the hosting space, one on your local computer and one copy on a service like Google Drive or Dropbox.
Set up email accounts in convenient places
Email accounts are also important for the aftercare of a website, because on your website you have an email address that customers or visitors can use to get in touch with you. Then it is also important that you keep an eye on this email address. It is easy to create an email account and set it up at MijnHostingPartner.nl, set it up on your phone within Spark email so you always get the latest mail. And so you can also respond quickly. Furthermore, you can also set the email account within your favorite mail program such as Thunderbird, Outlook and many others.
With a website you always have more work than you might think, and therefore it is often important to devote 1 or more people within your company to maintaining and creating content for the website. It is also possible to keep track of the results and conversions, with tools such as Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity. So you are not working in vain to make your website a success.
