Author: Theodore Bigby

Undoubtedly, the  benefits of regular website maintenance will lead to greater customer satisfaction, higher ranking in search and of course, stronger revenue.

Much like maintaining your home or car, maintaining a website is a task that can easily be pushed to the back of our mind. At least while everything is working well. Before we know it, the gutters are leaking, our roof is in a mess and the car won’t start right when we need it most.

Forget splashing out big for emergency tasks or revenue generating campaigns when you’re desperate for leads or revenue. Invest a little over a long period of time and reap the rewards for a lower total cost.

What’s more, keeping your website maintained helps your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Website maintenance tasks both technical and content based are part of a good SEO agency’s regular tasks. Keeping your website fast, navigable and up-to-date are the basics of SEO and you can achieve this by having a great Web Producer on your team.

The benefits of regular website maintenance you can expect are:

Better website security

Not only making sure plugins are updated, a lot of work goes into other background tasks you may not think of. Monitoring links aimed at your website. Checking search engine results pages for random, spam pages that shouldn’t be there. And regularly checking your website’s files on the server for any irregularities will help.

Improved website speed

When your website is properly maintained, it runs faster which helps a lot in the next point on the list.

Enhanced user experience

Users will enjoy a much enhanced user experience as a direct benefit of regular website maintenance. Security, speed, the ability to find what they want quickly and without errors.

Identifying and fixing website errors

Regular maintenance means you’ll always spot technical and content errors quickly and fix them before too many of your users even notice them. Probably not before Google bot finds is and reports you to

Staying up-to-date with the latest features and technology

Goes with the territory of running a top performing website. Instead of looking once every three years and being sold a total website rebuild you may not have even needed, if you keep your website’s technology up-to-date you will avoid that sudden huge financial outlay. It also helps keep your user experience and website speed up there with the best of them.

Optimised product listings and descriptions

If you’re in the e-commerce space, you’ve got this sorted, right? An important part of any website’s hygiene regimen, but especially so if you’re selling products.

Keeping content and promotions up-to-date

Similar to optimising your product listings and descriptions, every website includes content that should be kept up-to-date. Of course, if you include promotions, be sure to update them when they’re over or whenever a new promotion pops up.

Using hospitality as an example, a hotel may run an offer for Easter every year. In that case, it would be a great idea to create a landing page and keep it live throughout the year. Simply update it with the latest details and dates for the next event a few months before Easter. Great for your visitors and great for SEO.

Increased website rankings on search engines

Having up-to-date content and great (product or otherwise) descriptions on your website will help your search rankings.

Maintaining a secure website doesn’t just mean sticking an SSL Certificate on there. Help make sure sure your website doesn’t get hackedby finding and removing any attempts to hijack your website quickly so you don’t lose ground in search.

Tracking and analysing website performance is easy to do if you use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog and other great pieces of software.

Reduced downtime

Reliable, secure websites that choose a great hosting service enjoy reduced downtime. Keep your website online longer, make more money.

Improved website growth potential

If everything is running as it should, identifying new growth areas becomes even easier. You already know you’re performing well in all areas, so when it comes time to grow visibility even further, you won’t need to tackle 101 other tasks to make sure your new initiative actually has a positive effect.

You can achieve all of these benefits through small tasks that cost very little over a long period of time. Those benefits build up to deliver huge cost savings and revenue figures.

Help keep your website secure and ready to service your customers by following these three steps. These are just a few basic measures we should keep in mind because it’s easy to become complacent.

Following these steps doesn’t guarantee there will never be any problems, but can significantly reduce the likelihood things going wrong. The last tip is a free, yet often neglected way to identify problems

Plugins

For WordPress websites especially, plugins have been a game changer. Whatever functionality you needed for your website design, you could achieve without diving into your site’s code by installing a simple plugin. Because of that, plugins and WordPress itself became really popular.

Unfortunately, plugins can be a weak link in your armour. Often times, a theme will automatically update itself whenever a major update comes along. You may not want to update a plugin immediately and instead wait a short while to ensure the new version isn’t a dud.

This can lead to serious issues if not monitored closely. If your plugins aren’t kept up-to-date, hackers can use them to make changes to your website such as adding malicious code or making it crash.

There have even been plugins designed to improve the SEO of its creator by adding links from your website to their website. That’s not hacking a site, but if a developer were to use their plugin as a back door to allow them to add any random links they wanted, that definitely would not be cool.

If you want to keep your website secure, update your plugins manually or set them to automatically update if the option is available and you’re confident it won’t break your site.

Verify Themes

If you’re running WordPress, you might have a theme that’s been hacked because it isn’t kept up-to-date. Even worse, a theme that was created for the purpose of taking over your website.

Make sure you’re a genuine version of your theme and that all extra files or plugins it requires and installs to work have been updated.

Check Hosting Files

Though there are many great website hosts out there, sometimes they can be vulnerable to attack. One reason may be they’re running an old version of php. Running and old version of php can be a problem for websites running CMS like WordPress, Magento etc. Often, the server starts off on the most up-to-date version of php, but they don’t update it for you automatically. This is fair enough as changing php version can cause things to break. It’s up to you to make sure your server is running the most up-to-date version of php that your website and associated applications can handle to improve security.

Often with a WordPress website, you might find extra files on the server that shouldn’t be there. There could be code injected into some of the files WordPress needs to run securely. If you take a look at those files from time-to-time, it can be easier to keep your website secure because you may be able to spot anything suspicious before it becomes a real problem for you.

If your site isn’t running WordPress, the advice remains almost the same. Keep an eye out for seemingly random folders on your server.

Google Search Console

This free tool is Google’s own SEO health check-up tool for your website. If you aren’t using it already, start today. Google Search Console (GSC) is a great SEO tool. Why? Because it tells you exactly what Google thinks is wrong with your website, pointing you in the right direction to fix it.

Specifically to help keep your website secure, GSC will alert you if anything has gone wrong. Look at GSC’s reports on the pages you have indexed on Google and you should see about the same number of pages you have on your website. If it’s a lot more, there could be an indexing issue, or you might have a more serious problem. Click into the report and take a look at the pages listed.

If the pages include titles you don’t recognise, especially for blue pills, steroids, drugs, or gambling terms, you’re in trouble. By looking at the pages that have been created, you’ll be able to understand how they’ve targeted your website and possibly where to start looking for a solution on your own website.

On the other hand, with WordPress, you might get a bunch of pages on your domain like this: “/?s=” and then a load of dodgy terms. After checking your hosting files as suggested above, if you don’t find any files that shouldn’t be there, you might be a victim of a failed hack attempt. It might also be a seriously negative SEO campaign to ruin your reputation and rankings in search.

Not strictly a proactive measure, GSC is still super useful and you should connect it to your site right away.

What Next?

Hire a Web Producer to take care of all those tasks by taking advantage of our cost effective website management solution that frees up your time to concentrate on actually running your business. More Than Venice will always be on had to fix issues that arise while you carry on with your day.

Three essential tools you must look at as soon as you suspect you have a hacked website. something wrong. After checking these tools, you should know where you stand and be able to formulate a plan for recovery.

Three Hacked Website Resurces

This is a checklist of three tools that will help your website if you think it’s been hacked:

Google

In Google, type site:https://example.com/ with your website replacing example.com to see all the pages listed on Google search. What do you see? All of your pages exactly as they should appear, but whenever you click, you’re redirected to another website? Or the content you expect is different? Often, this kind of page/content redirect will be done at random. For instance, you could click onto your website three times and nothing strange happens. Then the fourth time you click, you get redirected to a bad website! Or depending on the hack, the bad content appears on your website.

This can happen a lot with WordPress and there are some files on your server that enable this to happen. See below where we go into a bit more detail on looking at files.

GoogleSearch Console

This tool might show pages that aren’t even on your website, or pages like ‘https://example.com/?s=’the bad search term’. This can be as a result of a website hosting spam links pointing to your website in a hope to get those pages indexed in Google. When clicked from search, those clicks can be captured and re-directed. Alternatively, they may be creted just to harm the way you look in search engines. It could also be a failed hack attempt to make those pages actually appear on your website as there will probably be no sign pf them on your side. If the pages are 404 not found, the attempt to host the content on your website has likely failed or is not visible at the time.

GSC also will deliver warnings that your website has possibly been hacked if it believes that to be the case.

Server Files

Check the files on your server for anything that shouldn’t be there. Anything out of the ordinary should be removed but you may find that it returns a day or two later. That’s definitely not what you want, but at least now you’re on the right track.

You may need to remove such files repeatedly until you find the root cause which is sometimes a line of code that has been injected somewhere in your website’s core files or as a result of an errant plugin. Keeping your site’s CMS and plugins up-to-date and being vigilant, you will eventually get rid of the issue.

This can be tricky, taking up a lot of your time and you may need to call in a professional or restore an older backup. This can turn into a real pain if you’ve been updating your website a lot and didn’t catch the issue right away.

Hack Recovery

Hack recovery can be a long and/or tough road and you might want to unleash a few more tools that may require a financial investment to help you get back on track.

A link tracker/analyser so you can see what spam links have been built
A website auditor to analyse your pages

One way to recover from hacking attempts or help prevent your site being hacked in the first place is to hire a web producer. Hack prevention is better than cure and we offer a Web Producer service to help keep your website secure.

As soon as signs of an issue are detected (which will happen much quicker if you’ve invested in ongoing SEO), instead of you spending hours, weeks or even months to fix the problem, we’ll put in the time and effort to get you back up and running as soon as possible.

Hire an experienced Web Producer to handle all of your website maintenance and growth.

Web production is the art of creating and or publishing content to a website. Often the most difficult task for small and mid-sized organisations, even larger companies often have problems in this regard. If you have an in-house marketer, they can take on these tasks (if they have the time). alternatively, you can pass on website content publishing tasks to your marketing agency.

Why Use A Web Producer?

By taking up our web production service, you remove the stress of publishing your content. For instance, you comight not produce much content at all and need help with that.

On the other hand, you might be able to produce a lot of great content, but distributing that content on a multitude of social media platforms can be daunting. Having to publish across your website, podcasting services, video platforms and more, takes a lot of valuable time. That’s time you could be using in revenue generating activities.

Using Scheduling Apps

Some organisations are not as effective as they could be on social media because they don’t format their content correctly for each platform. There have long been 3^rd party apps which allow cross-platform posting like  Hootsuite. However, copying and pasting your desired text can have differing effects on each of the platforms.

Here are a few problems that copy and paste creates which result from platform restrictions. You’ll find character limits are one big hurdle and they can vary greatly. Twitter only allows 240 characters and hashtags are encouraged because they are a really useful way to find content on that platform. LinkedIn allows posts with around 3,000 characters, allowing you to tell detailed stories.

If you write something for Twitter and post it to LinkedIn verbatim, it won’t be visually appealing. That poorly formatted text will leave a a lot of potential to woo your audience on the table. In reverse, if you write a great LinkedIn post and set it to post on Twitter automatically,it will truncate your post to under 240 characters with a link to the original post.

Posting Manually

Some social media platforms do not allow 3^rd party apps toposcontent. Everything they must be posted by a human. As a result, you might writeposts in bulk, then copy and paste at the time you want to post. Copying text from a post for Facebook that can include a link into Instagram is not a good look.

Why isn’t it a good look? Links are not clickable in Instagram posts, so that’s delivering a sub-optimal to poor user experience. As always, time is the enemy, but using a web production service will avoid those particular headaches. Combine web production with a copywriting service and your marketing will really stand out.

What You Get

A team of experienced web producers who have worked on hundreds of websites with their varied content management systems. We’ve completed a range of projects across website publishing, video editing, email marketing and of course posting to all the major social media channels.

Our knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in particular lends itself to being good at optimising your content for each platform. Your web production package gets you experts in multiple technical and creative disciplines across HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Photoshop.

Web Production Responsibilities

We manage, execute and depending on your requirements, sometimes even create your website content, email marketing campaigns, social media posts, and video content. All content is fully optimised for the target channel, bringing you greater credibility and your customers the best possible user experience.

Team members with a combined web publishing experience of over 35 years, highly qualified through practical experience and marketing qualifications. We have worked with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Modx, custom CMS and more.

It’s all about user experience for us and great user experience is exactly what we deliver to your audience with our Web Producer.

Start inspiring your customers, contact us today.

Birmingham sits at the heart of England, not far from the town of Meriden, considered by many to be the traditional centre of England. The place where canals from London and the North of England converge, Birmingham is said to have more canals than Venice. In fact, that’s how the name More Than Venice came about. Perhaps saying Birmingham has more miles of canal than Venice would be a more accurate statement, but who are we to argue with folklore?

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