Running a website can be hard, but it’s made harder when you’re not using the right tools.
And the right tools usually mean using a content management system, which makes the whole process of running a website much smoother.
Make managing your website easier;
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Pick a simple content management system
A CMS is one of the easiest ways to get a website online. The most powerful CMS is WordPress which makes managing a website a lot easier compared to having a bespoke custom-coded website.
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Choose a user-friendly theme
It’s important to choose a high-quality theme. There are a lot of themes out there, especially on WordPress but you need to look at the quality of the provider.
Do they have good reviews? Are there a lot of comments moaning about how terrible it is?
Don’t just judge a theme on how it looks, you might also want to test it for speed too.
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Monitor website speed
It’s important to be monitoring of the speed of your website to make sure that there are no bottlenecks.
Speed is an important factor when running a website, so you’ll want to regularly check your most important pages to ensure they are running smoothly.
Also, pay attention to the size of the images you’re uploading to your website. If they aren’t correctly optimised for dimensions and file size ( plus you’ll want to use a juicy keyword in there too) then you might find the images are way too big and slowing down your website
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Choose a great host
Choosing a good quality host can be the difference between smooth sailing or encountering problem after problem.
Cheap hosting can be good but you’ll need a certain amount of resources to help support your website.
You don’t need to be spending hundreds on a dedicated server but ideally, you want to be spending around £20-£40 for decent hosting.
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Frequent backups
For smaller sites that aren’t updated too often, you can get away with once a week or even once a month. However, if you’ve got a website that is adding content all the time, you need to be making backups daily or even hourly.
Think about it, if you’ve spent the day creating content and making changes on your website and at 8 pm it fails and you’ve only got backup from yesterday at midnight, you will have wasted the day.
It’s easy to do backups too, it’s automated so once you’ve set it up, no need to worry about it again.
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Uptime monitoring
Be the first to know when your website goes down instead of your clients. Having a website go down is never great but if you’re aware of exactly when it happens you’ll get it back online much faster.
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Update plugins regularly
Plugins are regularly updated. You don’t need to update the second it shows there’s an update but you don’t want to be leaving it too long.
You can set plugins to auto-update, however, sometimes this can lead to a fatal error that brings down your website so sometimes it’s best to leave it to a certain time, for example, Monday morning when you can go through your plugins, update and ensure they are working correctly.
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Update theme regularly
When the theme updates you need to update your version for the latest security patches and more.
If you’ve got a WordPress theme then you should ideally be using a child theme. This is because when you’re updating the theme, it can reset changes that you’ve made.
Using a child theme helps to separate things and gives you more control making sure the changes you make won’t be affected by the latest updates.
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Use a security plugin
There are quite a few different types of security plugins you can. It’s important to have one installed to help protect your website from daily threats
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Plugins are fine but use high-quality ones
You may have read that your website shouldn’t be using a lot of plugins. There’s some truth to this but the real issue is using poorly coded plugins.
If you’re using a plugin from a top developer that’s clean and updated regularly, then it’s fine to be using over 20 plugins, if you’re using bad ones, one can bring down your website.
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Add content to your website
Adding content to your website with a CMS is so easy. All you have to do is go to the page and either copy and paste or start writing.
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Update existing content
One thing a lot of business owners don’t do is update their content enough. Updating content helps show the search engines that your website is active and cares about creating relevant and updated content.
Plus, the content will get longer too which will help you rank for more keywords.
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Perform A/B testing
Some things work better than others. If your website isn’t getting the results you want, you can do A/B testing to help find ways to make it more efficient.
A lot of the time, it’s not the products or services that are bad, it’s the way you communicate your message.
Using things like different fonts, images, and button colours can all have significant effects on the conversion rate of your website
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Connect to google analytics
Connecting your website to google analytics should be one of the first things you do. GA is essential to understand how users are using your website and how they behave.
This allows you to make a better website that serves your audiences needs much better.
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Connect to Google search console
Google Search Console is another vital tool. GSC is great for helping identify which pages are indexed and which aren’t.
It’s also amazing for seeing which keywords are getting impressions in the search engines but most importantly where the clicks are coming from.
You’ll also find average positions too, click-through rates and a lot more.
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Use Canva for graphics
Managing a website can be tough but it’s made much easier when you’ve got the tools to help create amazing images.
Canva can also help with videos and social media content too. If you’ve never used it before, you’ll be amazed at just how easily they make everything.
There are a lot of different templates that you can be using to promote your business on social media.
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Use e-mail hosting from a different host
It’s fine to have email and website hosting through the same provider. It can make things easier but it can also mean that your website is more vulnerable if there are any threats.
It’s best practice to host your e-mail hosting and your website hosting because it gives you more control say if for example your website does get hacked.
And this can happen. It’s common for websites, especially poorly managed websites that don’t update their plugins to get hacked because there are a lot more vulnerabilities
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Use HTTPS
If you’re still using the HTTP protocol then you need to update to HTTPS. This means that you need to get an SSL certificate for your website, which is easier than it sounds.
For example, if you’re using cPanel, just hop on over and you’ll find a Let’s Encrypt button. What this does is makes it easy to add an SSL certificate and make your website more secure.
Remember though, if you’ve been using HTTP then you’ll need to redirect those pages to the HTTP version.
If you don’t, it’s likely the search engines will crawl those pages and either ignore them or mark them down for having duplicate content.
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Monitor 301 redirects
Pages change, and when they do you must have 301 redirects to show the search engines that they’ve changed, but sometimes things can do wrong.
Every so often just checks that everything is still working fine and the important pages are still getting redirected.
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Check for any orphan pages
Orphan pages are pages that aren’t linked to from anywhere on your website. Most blog pages won’t have this problem as they are automatically shown in the blog however this can be quite common for service pages.
If a page isn’t linked to from anywhere this makes it hard for the search engines to find and index them.
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Add internal links as you make more content
When you’re building more content, it will likely be related to the other content on your website. Go back to older content and update them by adding some internal links to new pages.
This is great for the user as it helps them access more information but it’s also great for the search engines too.
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Add video software to screen record
Did you know that you can add some software to your website and see how users are interacting with it?
That’s right, it’s amazing to see, well, if they choose to buy from you but it can be disheartening especially when they leave.
But this is all about learning. If customers aren’t engaging with your website you need to make changes to improve the user experience of the page and make it more engaging to the user.
This improves the likelihood that they’ll stay around and purchase from your website. You can use software like Crazy Egg to record visitors and see heat maps of the most popular areas of your website.
