A Comprehensive Guide to Website Management

Backup Of Website And Data

You and I have learned from experience that creating a backup is the only way to keep your data safe on a phone, a PC or any other electronic device. In like manner, websites need to be backed up too. We live in an era where cyber-attacks are common and several other issues like server-side mishaps and network breakdowns can occur. A site backup can help:

Avoid The Risk Of Data Loss

What if a member of your staff deletes some important data by mistake? Instead of blaming each other and getting all stressed out when that happens, you can make use of a pre-created backup.

Reduce Revenue Loss

Most websites gain revenue via sales, which is why each passing second when the website is down impacts your profits badly. The downtime can be easily reduced if you have a backup of site data.

Prevent Downtime Loss When You Revamp The Site

Websites have to be updated regularly, but they also require a complete or partial renovation occasionally. Creating the website in the first place would have been an intensive process, with unique ideas blended into pages, images, and written content. Losing all these to a rebuild will be a tragedy.

A backup will be the only option here. DO NOT let years and years of effort go to waste. Check these website backup services, which are some of the best picks used by professionals right now.

• iDrive
• SOS Online Backup
• Dropmysite.com

Does your website have a subscription add-on to it? Or is it an ecommerce web design where you sell products or services? Either way or other ways, the database of a website is what holds every morsel of the information that you add to it.

Database optimization includes the ways you should keep the site’s performance unscathed. But why in the world is this needed? (image below)

Database optimization can be done in many different ways, the most convenient of them being ‘using software’. Some of the best so far are:

• SolarWinds: Database Performance Analyzer
• Red-Gate
• EverSQL

Your social media promotions and paid ads will lead users to the landing page of your website. Thus, it can make or break their first impression about the site. Keep the landing page fully optimized and functional all the time.

Common Problems Landing Pages Face

• Slow loading and lagging (Mainly because of traffic)
• Unclear information in the loading page
• Glitches in the server
• The product/service displayed on the landing page could be out of stock

All these problems will only occur if you neglect the landing page. To make sure you don’t, regular checkups are needed. How hard could that be with all the easily accessible tools available?

• AdWordsRobot – GoogleAds-related landing page optimization
• UnBounce – Strategic report on increasing landing page conversion
• VWO Landing Page Analyzer – A comprehensive report on how to optimize appropriation, expressiveness and goal-driven approaches for landing pages

Sometimes, websites can face sudden breakdowns. This will cause inaccessibility. Downtime is the length of time a website stays that way.

Hardware malfunction

This is the one of the most widely observed reasons for a downtime to occur. Hardware malfunction is responsible for 50% of the downtimes happening in small and medium-scale businesses. The major causes of hardware malfunction can be server-side overheating, dislocation of ISP network cables or general power shortages.

Problems Of Web Hosting

Even though the website is yours, servers that host websites are not. The ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who own the servers will charge you for that. ISPs might promise that your website will have 99.99% uptime, which actually sounds more than perfect. But do their claims really live up to your expectations? Let’s find out.

0.01% of 24 hours = 8.64 s
8.64×7= 60.48 s or 2 minutes
8.64×30= 259.2 s or 4.32 minutes in a month
Annual downtime - 8.64×365= 3153.6 s or 52.56 minutes

However, these statistics may vary based on the circumstance. For instance, your website might have a downtime of a couple hours a day and have none whatsoever for the entire year. Or else, it could be down for a few seconds every day.
Experiencing downtime is pretty normal, and there is no way any server could completely eliminate it.

Cyber Attacks

Digital attacks are not an oddity, but there is certainly a diversified collection of ways cyber attacks happen. Two types that should be a concern for small business owners are;

• DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service attacks) – This attack takes the form of showering requests directed to your server. When the number of requests goes beyond the usual number a server can handle without problem, the server will crash.
• Malicious bots – This is a type of malware that is able to self-disseminate. These will be sent through security breaches to your website by black hat hackers. Overtime, your site will come down as a result.

1. Confirm First

Before you act out, you need to confirm that the site is really down. Use a website like isitdownrightnow.com to figure out whether it is a technical problem on your side or a real down.

2. Contact The Web Hosting Service

The hosting provider might know what the problem is, because there is a fair chance that the website might be down due to a technical problem or a maintenance issue on their side. Prior to contacting, make sure you check email to see whether they have sent a notice informing you of it.

3. Is It None Of The Above? Then It’s Probably You!

Mistakenly or out of ignorance, your website maintenance service provider could be the criminal!

Your web developer might have included an addition, reduction or a modification is made that is not compatible to the website (plugin updates, features, versions etc.) When you suspect something like this, you can refer to the back-end activity log to locate the action that resulted in a site breakdown. Identifying the issue will also help your web maintenance service to steer clear of it in the years to come.

Instead of getting all riled up when site breakdowns happen, you can opt to maintain a healthy strategy of website maintenance. Do not wait for something to happen and find solutions when you can prevent it from happening in the first place.

How can you prevent a website from going down?

Get Separate Companies For The Website And Domain Name

The domain name is the address your website goes by. When you host the website with one company and get another for the domain name, things will be a lot more convenient. In simpler words, your website that is down can be taken up by the second host.

Work With A Company That Uses A Monthly Plan For Hosting

The problem with annual plans is that you will have to stick with the company for a year, paying them for the package. Instead of settling for an annual plan, you can find a company that offers monthly plans for web hosting. This will help you figure out whether the particular web hosting company stays up to their claims. Pingdom, ServiceUpTime and UpTimeRobot are some of the effective tools you can use to supervise the hosting quality of your website. If the company proves its quality, you can decide to change your monthly plan to annual.

Backups Are Vital

A wise move is to keep a second company to host the backup of your website. The benefit of doing so is that you will have a second version to which you can direct your visitors to. This way, the main website’s downtime will not affect the customer experience in any way.

Excess of plugins

When plugins are used too much, the number of lines of code will increase in proportion. More lines will cause more requests to come, making the site take more time to load them.

Weighty graphics

Some websites, mostly ecommerce web designs, are stacked with images. A large collection of graphics results in more HTTP requests. In the process of responding to each of them, your site will load slower.

Performance of the server

Shared servers in particular host more than one website on each of them. The server needs to have a maximum performance to manage every HTTP request coming its way. If it does not, that contributes in slowing the load-time.

Traffic Volume Increase

High traffic is exactly what business owners strive to gain, but it is paradoxically one of the reasons for slow loading too. Higher traffic results in multiple requests that are quite difficult for the server to manage at once.

Even if you may have a lot of visitors with a lot of traffic, most of them will bounce out because of the slow loading. Eventually, this will affect badly on the traffic and conversion rates. The best thing is to use GTMetrix, Pingdom, PageSpeed Insights, or UpTrends to keep in track of the loading speed of your site.

Checking the speed will not be adequate, though. These tools will create a report that will help you identify the causes behind slow loading. Once you figure it out, you can consult a professional to fix the issues.

Not everything in a website is actually needed for its performance or quality. You can remove unnecessary elements from websites to keep them functioning smoothly. For example, spam comments, surplus of graphics and unneeded content can lengthen the loading speed. Clean the surplus with these tools to give your visitor a hassle-free experience.

• WP Optimize
• Autoptimize
• WP Super Cache

Most business websites have a search bar and a subscription form, you possibly do too. If you own an online shop, you have a form for checkout as well, indeed.

What most hackers follow is the method of “SQL Injection”, which grants them illegal access to the website database of someone else. Check your website forms every day before things get worse and they gain access to the data, both yours and your customers’.

Use these vulnerability checkers:

• Online Scanner by Pentest-Tools
• Acunetix
• ScanMyServer

Website analytics include the traffic channels and rates, visitor locations, number of clicks, bounces, searches, and traffic and search volumes. This is basically the activity log of your website and its interactions with the users.

A regular evaluation of analytics can guide you towards the necessary changes and optimizations. As analytics sum everything up in a quantitative analysis, you can use it to identify the loopholes of your pages in a qualitative approach.

Google Analytics is very raw, with numbers defining its whole essence. If you are not an expert in web development, wrapping your head around the quantitative details will be difficult. Without trying to read Google Analytics as they are, you can opt to use some visualization tools. These are not only super easy to work with, but also give a comprehensive and intelligible overview of your website’s performance.

• Infogram
• Sisense
• Google Data Studio
• Domo
• Zoho Reports

One of the key concerns of a website developer is to check for compatibility across different browsers devices. Of course your website might have tested positive back then. But it did not stay the same way afterwards, did it?

New plugins, fresh content, new code lines and other changes that are added to a website makes it an ever so changing place. Some browsers and devices may not be able to synchronize with these changes, causing the particular browser or device to either display the website with flaws, or not at all. This will result in giving some of your customers an unfavorable browsing experience.

To avoid such issues of browser compatibility, there are some useful tools that will come handy.

• LambdaTest
• CrossBrowserTesting
• TestComplete

To avoid such issues of browser compatibility, there are some useful tools that will come handy.

• BrowserStack
• Katalon
• Ranorex

The initial goal of building a website, and the only reason to keep it functioning are your customers. As business owners, you have to value the quality of the customer experience over anything else. Every issue related to customers needs immediate addressing.

Be Quick To Respond

Continuous positive optimization and additions to your website will be a great customer magnet. However, the unavoidable truth is that your sales will gain reviews in return. It will not only feel great to receive a positive review from a customer, but also other visitors will be encouraged to buy from you too. Therefore, responding to customer reviews is a crucial part of a business strategy.

Respond to reviews regularly. Answer their questions, be thankful for their appreciations, and address complaints and suggestions.

Is Your Website “Under Maintenance”? Be Creative With It

Like we discussed before, there will be times your website is down. Be prepared and face it in style.

Instead of just adding a page that says “Website under maintenance” and nothing else, you can include creative elements. For instance, you can let the visitors know that your site is down without irritating them.

• Customize the announcement using styles, designs and text specific to your branding and business identity
• Add some useful links that you think the users might be interested in
• Use a joke or a funny image to tone their disappointment down

A similar strategy is used by Google Chrome. Upon connection disruptions, Chrome lets you play the Dinosaur game while you wait for reconnection. All we have to do is help the cute dinosaur run without hitting the obstacles. Customer-oriented approaches like this will take an extra effort, but will always work.

Website elements include everything from text to infographics and to plugins. These elements can be properly managed in many ways.

Content Updates

It is vital for a website to always stay head to head with the evolving trends and updating information. Never let your content stagnate or state wrong, disproven details. Fresh and engaging content helps gain better conversion rates, and your visitors will be pleased too. Delve deep into your research and include valuable, non-contradictory content.

Individual Plugin Updates

When your site has more than one plugin, each of them needs to be updated individually. Plugins fulfil tasks like automatic site backups, image compression and JavaScript minimization. Plugin updates are the backbone that keeps your site performance satisfactory and reduces cyber attacks.

To outsmart hackers, you need a strong security management system protecting your site. Apart from hiring a professional to check for security breaches and ambiguities in the website, you can follow these simple steps.

Password Management

Unlike some time ago, having a strong, long and unpredictable password is not the only way to dodge hackers.

• Use a tool such as DashLane, RoboForm, or LastPassto generate intricate passwords
• Never use the same password twice
• Constantly change your passwords to block the hacker’s access (At least once every week)
• 2-factor authentication adds a supplementary cover of security to your site, thus keep it installed

Other Ways Of Security Management

• Renew your SSL certificate so that the site will not be hoaxed
• Keep in touch with your web hosting provider to know about new features and suggestions for security enhancement
• Remove backend access from post-employees or those who should not necessarily have it
• Security professionals can help you track hackers down
• Use tools like IndusFace, NetSparker, or NoGoToFail for security checks. Or get an expert!

Managing Traffic

Business websites, especially ecommerce sites, tend to gain higher traffic in sales and festive seasons than usual. Too much traffic might cause your servers to crash, resulting in a dramatic decrease in conversions. Keep this from happening by going for a hosting company that offers extensible services.

Also, remember that in such cases of traffic overload, high traffic testing is mandatory. These high traffic testing tools will identify the glitches and downfalls of your website structure in such situations.

• LoadNinja
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• SmartMeter

To cut the long story short, here is a compact list of the best methods of website management we already discussed.

Regular Maintenance

• 1. Backup of site and data
• 2. Database optimization
• 3. Landing page checkup
• 4. Preparing and managing downtime
• 5. Keeping site load-time under check
• 6. Ditching superfluous elements
• 7. Checking for vulnerabilities in forms
• 8. Reviewing analytics
• 9. Checking whether the site works well across browsers and devices

Management Of Customer Situations

• 1. Be quick to respond
• 2. Being creative with the “website under maintenance” page

Manage The Elements Of A Website

• 1. Content Updates
• 2. Individual Plugin Updates

Security Enhancement And Management

• 1. Password management
• 2. Other ways of security management

To Ensure Productive Website Management

As the owner of the business, you probably have very little time to spend on a comprehensive process like this. The easiest way to tackle this problem is by hiring a professional website management service provider.

Finally, do keep in mind that website management strategies, just like everything else, keep evolving. Find an expert that is versatile, open-minded and skillful.