Website maintenance and reporting

It’s important to perform regular website maintenance to keep your site up to date. What’s more, web reporting allows you to see how your website visitors behave.

Why maintain your website?

There are lots of reasons to update your website regularly:

• It shows your business is active. If visitors see that your site changes frequently, they’ll return more often to see what’s new.
• It helps your search rankings. Search engines like Google check how often websites change and use this to help determine rankings.
• It reduces customer queries. By updating your site with the information customers request, you can cut the number of queries you receive.
• Continual improvement. If you check your web reporting each week and use it to tweak areas of your site, you’ll soon see big improvements.

Maintain your website content

You might need to perform several tasks to keep the content on your website updated:

• Remove or refresh old content. Outdated information should be changed or removed from your website.
• Add new content. It can be wise to add content regularly – particularly if you run a blog or offer news.
• Change product and pricing information. If your products or prices change, your website should reflect this.

How often you refresh and review what’s on your site will depend on how important the site is to your company. If it only contains basic information about your business, you probably won’t need to update it very often.

Conversely, if you run an e-commerce website which generates lots of revenue, you’ll need to regularly update it to change promotions, keep customers interested and ensure details of the items you sell are bang up to date. You can also benefit from checking your web reporting statistics daily – even minor changes could boost your bottom line.

Web reporting

You can access lots of web reporting data to find out how people use your website. This can be valuable when deciding what changes to make:

• See how website visitors find your site
• Find out which pages are most popular
• Track visitor journeys through your pages
• Monitor conversion rates and identify barriers to purchasing
• See which areas of your page are clicked most

You can collect web reporting data by installing a web analytics system. This involves placing a block of computer code onto your site. It can often be done automatically.

You can use the information this code collects to justify changes. For instance, if people tend to leave your site during the registration process, you might simplify the registration form, then use web reporting to see what difference this makes.

Many web analytics packages are free and offer access to extensive information about your website. Be wary of information overload and use your overall business objectives to determine which areas of your site to concentrate on.

Every site update matters

A good way to ensure maintenance and updates get done is to establish a regular schedule and delegate the tasks to specific people. For instance, you could perform price changes and add new products on Tuesdays. Set a regular time to check web reporting data too.

You might also be able to automate maintenance to some extent. Content management systems often allow you to set a date for content to expire. You can also keep a list of pages on your website and aim to review each at regular intervals – say once every six months. Many web reporting tools also allow you to deliver key reports automatically by email.