Having a website seems like a very straight forward marketing tool. You get a website built to tell people about your nonprofit’s mission and how it’s making a difference. Once everything is the way you want it, you don’t have to worry about it anymore…right?
The truth of the matter is that creating the website is only the start of this marketing tool. After the website is created there is still a need to do maintenance that needs to be done on a regular basis to keep things running efficiently and to stay optimized… but what does maintenance to a website really look like?
Performance
- Usability: Does everything on your website work after doing any software updates? Usability can include everything from buttons working to viewing images bigger to videos playing when they’re supposed to. Making sure everything continues to work the way it’s supposed to helps increase the time people stay on your website.
- Theme: People like to use themes to help design the overall look of the whole website. By keeping the theme up–to–date you reduce any possible chances for something on your website to not work entirely.
- Plugins: Plugins are a great way to enhance the functionality of your website. Most plugin creators make security or feature changes on a regular basis. By keeping it up-to-date, you reduce the chance of it breaking or making your website vulnerable to hackers.
- Content Layout: Websites these days are built to adjust content so the visitors using different screen sizes can have the best experience possible. It’s important to make sure things are where you wanted and working like they are supposed to be.
- Analytics: Without analytical knowledge about what is happening on your website, it becomes very difficult to determine whether your website is making a difference. By reviewing Google Analytics periodically, you can track the movements and activities of visitors so you can better understand how to improve your current website.
- Sitemap: Part of optimizing your website is by telling Google about the different pages on your website and how they are all connected. Anytime you add or remove pages to your website, your sitemap should reflect it. To do just that, you can get a plugin called YoastSEO to send that information to Google for you.
- Test Performance: Having compelling images, powerful messages and motivating call-to-actions on your website are ineffective if it takes too long to load your website. Testing the load speed of your website from an outside source like pingdom.com helps find possible performance issues that need to be addressed.
Security
- Backups: Sometimes accidents happen that cause issues for your website. By regularly backing up your entire website you make it easier to recover if something were to happen. The more often you update your website, the more often you need to back it up.
- SSL Certificate: When someone is interested in donating to your organization, they want to make sure their payment is received in a secure way. By having an SSL certificate, you will help to protect donor information.
- Security Plugin: Security on your website is important for you, donors, and website visitors. One way to help protect the information on your website is by using a security plugin, like Jetpack. They will help protect the information on your website, notify you if something is happening that seems abnormal, and more.
Time to Take Action!
This list of things to maintain can look daunting to take care of on a regular basis. The different items can be maintained on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or even yearly basis. Some of the tasks can be adjusted to happen more often if you make a lot of regular changes.
Weekly
Responding to blog comments and form submissions on a weekly basis helps stay connected to your visitors. Weekly plugin updates and entire website backups will help protect your website and all the information on it. It’s also helpful to look at your website from a laptop and smart phone to make sure everything still looks and works as expected.
Monthly
Updates to your platform and theme on a monthly basis, along with checking for broken links and redirects helps to make sure your website is working in top shape. This is also a great time to update calendar events, make any necessary changes to content, add blog posts, and make sure Google Analytics is working like it’s supposed to.
Quarterly
Now is the time to make sure your website is working effectively and efficiently. This is when you will want to look at Google Analytics to see if your website is working toward the goals you have, run a browser test, and check into the load speeds for your website.
Yearly
At the end of the year you will want to make sure your dates are updated to the new year and the time to review your paid services (domain registration, domain hosting, and paid advertising). This is also the best time to do an overall review on how your website and the goals you had setup, by reviewing Google Analytics. Once you’ve looked over that data, you can use it to determine your new year’s goals.
