4 Tips for long-term website maintenance

Once you have finished designing and setting up your website, you can start the real work on a website. Namely, the content and building your website into a success. In order to make sure that your website is secure, stays online and is enjoyable to use, there are a few things you need to keep in mind as a webmaster. These are what we want to cover in this article!

Responsibility of a webmaster

As a webmaster, or person who creates and maintains a website, you take on a number of responsibilities that you may not be aware of when you begin the project. A website is a living thing and needs to be maintained to get the most out of it. With our regular packages like the Total SSD hosting package and the .NET Core packages, we make sure that you have the foundation to make the most of website hosting. Server maintenance is then on our side, but website maintenance and hosting settings are otherwise at your expense.

Every website, with a few exceptions, needs regular maintenance to stay up and running. Unfortunately, you can't declare a website good after you publish it and then do nothing to it for years. As a host, we regularly see that this is the thought process, with the result that the website stops working, gets hacked, or is otherwise no longer useful to a visitor.

So, if you want to create a website and make it a success, you have some responsibility yourself to ensure the success of your website. To find out how you can do this, check out the following 4 tips!

Tip 1, period of inactivity? Screw security.

It can happen to any webmaster that a website is not used for a while, for example, due to vacation, an additional project that takes time, or when the focus is on another website. In this case, it is advisable to take some precautions to ensure that your website is at least not compromised. Writing permissions for a website play an important role in this regard. If you are not active on a website for a while, it is more than advisable to disable it completely and set it to "read only". You can do this from both the Customer Panel and the Control Panel by setting up the appropriate permissions under Websites.

This means that virtually all actions that describe files on a website can no longer be performed, and with WordPress, for example, it is then also the case that you cannot download or update plugins. This also means that malicious people have no way to make changes within your website, as is often the case with hacked websites. In most cases, they then create a link from your website to a malicious URL. Or they misuse your and your visitors' data in other ways.

Also, before you go inactive for a while, make sure that all your passwords are secure and delete any accounts that you do not use. For example, if you still had your test password set, such as the well-known Welcome12, or admin and admin. Then now is the time to update them to generated strong passwords.

Individual accounts can be FTP accounts that are no longer needed, as well as administrator accounts that were created for a website. Temporary accounts that no longer or rarely need to be used can be stopped and deleted. Abandoned accounts are also often a reason why a hacker has infiltrated a website.

Tip 2: Set up Uptime Robot or another monitor

Monitors are handy tools that allow you to have your website checked for uptime at regular intervals. Uptime Robot, which we've covered before, is a simple solution that lets you monitor up to 50 websites for free. With a 30-day history, a warning if something is wrong with the website, and an uptime percentage. The only thing Uptime Robot doesn't offer in the free option is SSL checking, but that can be invested in the premium version.

So if an error code occurs on your website, you'll get an instant notification about it in the app or via email. And you can take immediate action to fix the error.

Tip 3: Update your website at least once a month.

We keep repeating it, but updating a website remains the most important task of any webmaster. Make sure you check your website at least once a month for updates and other things that need to be updated. This includes any comments that may have been received. Always make a backup copy of your website before making any updates, and make sure you have that backup copy stored in three places. For example, once inside your hosting package in a folder outside the wwwroot. Once in a storage solution like Google Drive, and once on a local computer. Then, should the end of the world occur, your website will still be stored in one of these places.

Tip 4: Keep putting new content on your website.

New content is another important part of updating and maintaining a website. After all, if you don't add new content to a website, it will eventually lose relevance. An example of this is a news website: If it stops publishing news, it's no longer relevant. The same principle applies to many types of industries and fields. As long as you are distributing relevant content that keeps your business or website relevant, you have a better chance of success.

Have you been working on a project for an extended period of time? What are your 4 tips for maintaining a website? Let us know on social media!