Give a forgotten website a boost

As your portfolio of websites grows, it's possible that some of them will be forgotten. In this blog post, we'll explain how you can give those websites a boost in performance, security, and Google ranking again. Let's get started.

If you run your own business or manage a website for a single company, your portfolio often remains limited to website hosting and a single hosting package. However, if you are a webmaster who manages different types of websites in different industries. Then you will always have a few that fall short due to lack of motivation, lack of traffic or lack of results. In this blog post, we will share with you some tips and tricks that you can start using to expect more from these websites as well.

Review the site

Checking the website is, of course, the first thing on your list. To do this, bring up the website in your browser and check to see if everything is still working properly. If you get a white page, error message, or other error, it needs to be fixed first before you can proceed. White pages within WordPress or other PHP systems can often be easily fixed by changing the PHP version, checking the advanced error messages, or doing some updates in the background. It is of utmost importance that a backup is also set up for such sites that have been forgotten. This can save you a lot of work.

You can perform maintenance and cleanup of backups every six months. As long as you don't exceed the pack size, there's not much to worry about. And if your site gets infected with malware, you can quickly restore it with a backup before you update it.

Updating versions

Version updates often have a big impact on the user experience, in many cases improving speed, giving the interface a facelift, and making it more pleasant to use. This works slightly differently for each content management system. We have a large number of articles on this in our knowledge base that you can use for this.

When updating versions, you can check the PHP version, ASP.NET version, plugin versions, theme versions, and core versions. All these things need to be updated for a secure and fast website. Even a forgotten website should be updated regularly.

Also, now is a good time to make sure any unused plugins are removed, as well as remove any unused themes or code. These are often space-saving tasks, but they can also make your website more secure.

Clean up potential pollution in the form of files and SPAM.

Every now and then, there may be pollution on your website, this often comes in the form of SPAM messages or other files. Especially if your website uses a contact form, comments on messages and a guestbook. These are popular targets for spammers trying to get backlinks and inject malware.

We recommend not allowing anything to be put on your website without permission. And always do so in moderation. This prevents a lot of things and ensures that messages are not immediately visible on your website. And thus possibly scare off users.

Contamination in files can be previous versions that can be removed, or redundant files. This is often only possible if you are sure that it is not the current website. And should therefore be removed with some attention. So also with a backup, if necessary.

Check and update search engine results

To check how many visitors there were on a forgotten website, you can use Google Analytics or any other program you have installed for this purpose. You can also take a look at Google Search Console to see what terms you ranked for and where you can get even better results. This is always a good strategy to get more out of existing content. For example, by adding a keyword, changing some text, or adding more sitelinks.

Editing old content is often faster than creating new content. And you can dedicate a week to it to completely revise it. This can then be indexed for a few months. Then to look again to see what has changed in your Google search results.

So, with a little effort, you can update your older websites and make sure they start getting better results again. If you have any questions, you can always come to the online chat. We can always give you some tips for your specific website and environment.