New Year’s Resolutions for Your Website

Dec 18, 2015 | Websites

By: Jarrod "Jay" Skeggs

By: Jarrod "Jay" Skeggs

Founder & CEO

New Year’s Resolutions for Your Website

by Dec 18, 2015Websites0 comments

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.

What About Your Website?

What are your resolutions for your website for the new year? Will you be marketing your website more heavily? Will you be having your website redesigned? Share what your plans are in the comments.

If you’d like help with anything mentioned in this blog post, or anything else for that matter, please feel free to get in touch with me.

See all content from the Websites category.
Get help with Websites

"*" indicates required fields

Name*
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Related Posts

Guard your website from Email spam bots

Guard your website from Email spam bots

Are you suddenly receiving a lot of email spam? If so, you’ll want to determine if there is a source of this email spam that is easily identifiable. The first place I always recommend examining is your website. If you have email addresses that are accessible by email spambots on your site, then there’s a good chance that could be the source. In this post, I share several methods for making sure that your website isn’t feeding the evil email spambots.

read more

Get Help With Your Websites

Do you still have questions, problems, concerns or perhaps immediate issues that need to be addressed?

I’m quickly accessible by phone or you are welcome to schedule a FREE 30 minute meeting to find out how our team can help.