With the new year quickly approaching, you may be thinking about all of the things that you want to accomplish from a web presence perspective. Especially if, like most, you had great intentions this past year but didn’t execute well on many or all of your web presence goals.

Here are 3 practical and important resolutions that you should consider for your website in the new year.

Content Creation Schedule

If you are like most folks your task list is full, but your spare time is scarce. One of the best ways to ensure that you keep your website fresh and ranking highly with search engines is to create new content regularly. Set a goal that will challenge you but not one that you can’t attain. Even if you post some new content once per quarter, that’s better than nothing. In order to help you accomplish this, go ahead and calendar the content creation events now. Set up a notification for the event and build this into your schedule and you’ll be more likely to make it happen.

Backup Plan

Wait a minute, my website lives in the cloud, so it’s already backed up right? Wrong! (Most likely wrong anyway). There are numerous reasons for backing up your website (and database if applicable). These reasons would include things like, getting hacked beyond repair, forgetting to renew your website hosting or a data center catastrophe.

Vetted Updates

If your website runs on the WordPress platform, and about 35% of all websites do, then you should always vett WordPress updates, plugin updates and theme updates. The vetting process is not just checking to see if they are compliant with the latest version of WordPress. Ideally, you’ll want to maintain a staging system or a development copy of your website and apply the updates on a non-production version of your website to ensure that there are no issues when applying the updates.

Horror Story Example

I once had a client email me early on a Saturday morning in a bit of a panic because their website was down and they usually get a lot of orders on the weekends. I quickly tried to load their website in my browser and the page that loaded looked to me like a web hosts holding page when you first buy a domain but haven’t built a website yet. I quickly tried to login to the client’s web hosting account, (which was not on my hosting, unfortunately), and noticed that I couldn’t get logged in.

To make a long story short, my client had discontinued using the email address that he originally signed up for hosting with, and as a result, had missed the notifications that his hosting was about to expire. Fortunately, the client was engaged with me on a Managed Services Plan that included redundant backups. So, we had a copy of his website files and database. In the end I looked like a hero, but the real hero was the client, because they had the prudence and wisdom to invest in a backup plan.