Management of a network with several websites

There are many webmasters, small businesses and freelancers who do not limit themselves to a single website. They can easily set up multiple websites and build up a nice portfolio of domains and associated websites over the years. In this blog post, we'll look at how this can work for you and how you can keep track of it all.

Security first - keep a maintenance plan

The internet doesn't stand still, and the technology used to create your websites needs to be constantly updated and, most importantly, kept secure. In addition, a website can use a facelift every few years, with a fresh new design and therefore a new layout. Make a maintenance schedule in which you check all your websites, e.g. once a month, and make sure that an up-to-date backup copy of the website is stored in several physical locations. All updates are up to date and you check what has changed in the updates.

As for major maintenance or implementing a new website design, you can also make this as difficult as you want. With WordPress, for example, you can install and configure a different theme for your website with minimal effort. This is also possible with many other content management systems. This is important to keep up to date with the design of your website and to keep it from looking old-fashioned.

Under the same hosting package or split?

At MijnHostingPartner.nl, we have the option of hosting multiple domains here with most packages. With the natural growth of your portfolio, you can choose to fill every package here, but this is not advisable in some situations. Especially if you manage the website for another party. A separate login and management is then often highly recommended.

If you manage domains exclusively for yourself, you may prefer to divide your package between your domains and projects. Each website has its own folder within the hosting package. And can therefore be managed separately.

Keep an overview of your portfolio

The main problem with managing multiple websites is keeping an overview. This can be difficult, but there are a number of online tools that can make your job easier. With tools like Trello, you can create a to-do list or action plan for each website you manage. This works particularly well if you use it correctly and enter every step and action you need to take for an individual website. And keep track of it once you've done this. An action point can vary, but could be adding a new landing page, writing a social media post or creating a YouTube short film for your services or product. Internet and especially content marketing for a website is an ongoing process that you need to be involved in again and again.

In our customer panel you can also keep an eye on the administrative matters of your domains and packages, always pay attention to the e-mail address you have given us as a contact option. We will send you all important information to this address, such as an upcoming renewal of a package or domain, as well as all other relevant information. In this way, you can also decide in good time not to continue operating a domain and website and avoid unnecessary costs by canceling in good time.

Monitoring and analysis within your portfolio

It also makes sense to keep a monthly overview of what has happened on a website. You can do this fully automatically with software such as Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity. However, you can also track this manually and summarize it in a report in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets. In this way, you can also merge reports from multiple sources into one overview. This in turn helps you to maintain an overview. You can see at a glance what the total number of monthly visitors per website was or how many clicks you received on your social media posts, or any other key figure that is important to you.

If you notice that one of your websites is plummeting or falling behind in the results month after month, you can quickly identify this in such reports. Then review your strategy for that website and create an action plan to improve it. We'll go into this in more detail in tomorrow's blog post. So keep an eye on our blog!