There’s a lot of work in running an online business. Since websites are essential to sustain and thrive for businesses, you need to ensure that your website is always running smoothly without hiccups. For that, you need to have a website maintenance services provider to effectively run your website. If the website maintenance cost is not under your budget, then you need to have the right tools and a few tips and tricks to do the job yourself.
Maintaining your website doesn’t have to be that hard, as there are lots of nifty tools available and a few tricks that will enable you to maintain and manage your website better.
We have put together the five best free and affordable tools and five best tricks to help you maintain your website.
1. WordPress
WordPress is probably the most dynamic Content Management System (CMS) in the modern world today. There’s a valid reason why most websites, especially small businesses, are built on WordPress. This is because it’s a stellar combination of functionality and flexibility that enables content to be easily managed as needed for the project.
One of the best traits of WordPress is that it’s absolutely free. Not only that, but it’s also quite easy to build and manage a WordPress website.
Another reason for its popularity is that it offers tons of tutorials and how-tos of maintaining a WordPress website. Thus, making it quite convenient for businesses to easily maintain their websites.
WordPress also offers many essential functionalities for businesses; it also offers tons of plugins that can add more functionalities and improve your website significantly.
2. Gator Website Builder
Gator Website Builder is the fastest and cheapest option to build a professional website from scratch. If you’re a small business, you can easily build a website within hours. Moreover, you can quick updates and changes on your website within seconds.
What makes Gator Website Builder a great option for creating a website is that it offers you a basic template that helps you start building your website from the get-go. Then all you need to do is utilize the drag-and-drop menu to build your website as needed for the project. That includes picking out the colors, images, fonts, text size, and much more to customize your website.
The best part of these templates is that they are highly responsive on any screen size. They will look good on desktop computers as well as on mobile devices.
3. cPanel
cPanel offers administration to the entire server. This is an automation tool with a graphic user interface that simplifies the process of hosting a website. cPanel allows the website owner to manage the following
- Website files
- Domain names
- Email addresses at your domain name
- Setting up redirects
- Website backups
- Website databases
- Installing basic security features
The functionality and appearance of cPanel will depend on the web hosting provider you choose for hosting your website.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is another essential and free tool for analyzing the performance of your website. It’s a highly recommended tool that is leveraged in all types of business enterprise.
Even though it’s free, it still offers comprehensive information about the highly essential website for businesses. That crucial information and features include:
- Information on how visitors land on your website.
- The most visited website pages
- Whether the traffic comes from desktop or mobile devices.
- Demographics and behavior of your website visitors.
- The time spent on your website.
- The entire journey of visiting your website; the beginning and end of their session.
- The last page they visit
- How many of them converted, based on your business requirements
There are many more features that Google Analytics offers, making it one of the essential tools you need to maintain your website.
5. Joomla
If WordPress is not your cup of tea and looking for a good alternative, then you should opt for Joomla.
Even though it’s not easy to manage as WordPress but sometimes it’s a better option. For instance, the platform of Joomla is much more secure and not as vulnerable to cyber-attacks as compared to WordPress. Moreover, it’s also a better platform with a better social component that visitors to create accounts and interact with one another on the website.
Joomla is also a free and open-source platform, meaning it gets consistent updates. Moreover, many modules add to your functionality. Like WordPress, there are numerous tutorials online of Joomla which can help in your learning curve. Since Joomla has more technical functionalities and features, therefore, it’s recommended for business owners to hire a Joomla expert if they want to work on Joomla.
5 Best Tips For Business Website Maintenance
Maintaining your website is the best strategy for retaining your customers. This is because website visitors always engage with fast and reliable websites.
Therefore, you need to fix bugs, technical issues, security issues, loading speed, and broken links. Otherwise, your website will start to increase bounce rate, consequently will affect your bottom line.
You can effectively solve all of these issues by following these five best tips for business website maintenance.
1. Check The Loading Speed
Page loading speed is the most crucial aspect of website maintenance. According to Clutch, 52% of visitors will bounce immediately if the website takes too long to load.
Ideally, a website should load within three seconds. If you have loading speed issues, there’s a tool called GTmetrix that helps gives performance reports of your website.
The dashboard of GTmetrix will provide a detailed overview of your page score that also lets you know about your website’s load time.
When your website loads faster, it will allow your potential customers to decide on buying your product or service. Otherwise, your potential customers will likely bounce, resulting in falling your place on search engine ranking pages (SERP).
2. Conduct A Regular SEO Audit
Conducting SEO audit on a regular basis helps improve your website’s ranking on SERPs.
When you perform an SEO audit, you would be able to:
- Make an analysis of your competitors.
- Know the current ranking of your website
- Check your website’s speed
- Find bugs and errors on your website
- View the current status of indexing and crawling
- Identify and fix broken links
4. Keep Content Fresh And Up-To-Date
If you want to retain and attract new visitors, you need to keep your content up-to-date. This includes
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Event landing pages
- Images
- Contact information
- Legal information
When you write fresh content, you’d be able to attract new visitors. But how would readers know whether it’s fresh or not? That’s why you need to include the date of publishing at the beginning of your article. Moreover, search engine crawlers are also able to find fresh content and help them rank websites accordingly.
Also, make sure to utilize your image at the right content of your webpage. For instance, e-commerce websites have to regularly update their prices on their products services
Not only that but also you need to update your privacy policy, terms and conditions, and disclaimers regularly.
5. Provide An Exceptional User Experience
Visitors want more personalized user experiences. Therefore, you need to come up with strategies that entice your existing and potential users.
For instance, most of the searches today come from mobile devices that should compel you to take the mobile-first approach in delivering an exceptional user experience.
Moreover, you should also look into web browsers whether they are easily compatible with your website. Also, ensure these web browsers work perfectly on mobile devices.
Conclusion
Maintaining your website on a regular basis is the key to the success of businesses, no matter the size or industry. It not helps your business sustain but thrives in the competitive world of today.
Moreover, website maintenance helps build trust and a loyal following of your customers.
Therefore, it’s crucial for your website to be free from errors and bugs that could kill the user experience.
So, leverage these tools and tips to maintain your website and improve your customer engagement and conversions.