How to Monitor and Maintain Your Own Website

You cannot build a website, or have it built and then simply forget it. You will need to monitor it's performance and to carry out periodic maintenance.

Among other things it is very important to understand:

• Your Search Engine Rankings
• How your visitors interact with your website
• If you have broken links
• If you have problem Pages e.g. no title or description
• Do the site forms work
• Update pages
• Add New Pages
• Add/Remove links
• etc

The level of effort required depends on the site complexity and the number of pages but for typical small business sites <25 that have only occasional updates then an hour or 2 every month/2 months is all that is normally required once the site is reasonably established (1 year old).

You do not need to buy expensive software or tools to do the job as Google supplies all you need for free with the Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics.

Your first job is to register your site to use Google Webmaster tools and for Google Analytics. To do that you will need a Google account which is free and is linked to your email address.

I would recommend using an email address that you don't publicly use, as it is more secure.

You can also use a Google Gmail account and again I would create an account that I would only use with webmaster tools and analytics, Adwords or Adsense.

Your Control Panel

Your website is managed via a control panel the most popular being cpanel. Through the control panel you can do such things as

• change your passwords
• Add subdomains and new domains
• Add software like wordpress,Joomla etc
• Create new email addresses and autoresponders
•  and much more

I use/and recommend two hosting providers: Blue Host  for USA hosting and 1&1-UK -for UK hosting, and they use two different control panels.

You can find articles /tutorials and videos on using the respective control panels to manage your hosting account in the managing your Hosting account section.

 Website Traffic- Monitoring and Reporting

This is perhaps the most important part, and the one than very few website owners do. How is your site performing?

• Is your traffic increasing or decreasing?
• Where is your traffic coming from?
• What keywords are your visitors using?
• How is your traffic converting to customers?
• How profitable is your site?
• etc

Before you can answer these questions you will need to install traffic reporting/monitoring software. I use and recommend the free Google Analytics tool.

Updating

Because you will need to update your site from time to time, it is important that you know how, or employ someone who does.

This is why I always advocate that you become familiar with basic web site technologies as it makes running your site much easier.

Monitoring and Maintaining

It is important that your site:

• Is online
• Contains no broken links
• No missing images
• That it displays correctly in various browsers.

Related Articles and Resources:

• How to backup your website- Unfortunately most people don't really understand the Importance of backing up their website until they need it when usually it is too late. Don't get caught out !Understand what to backup and how to do it
• How to Check for Broken Links on Your Website-Almost every website will contain broken links. However it is important that you don't have too many and to fix those you have as soon as possible
• Moving Host and Domain Name Registrars-If You are thinking of moving hosting provider then see how I moved Host and Domain Name Registrars changing from a Uk host to a USA host