Website maintenance – all the things you should be doing

In this episode, we dive deep into the nitty-gritty of website maintenance – all those essential tasks that keep your site running smoothly but often get overlooked.

Whether you’re managing your own website or just curious about what your web team actually does behind the scenes, we’ve got you covered with practical tips and real-world insights.

What We Cover

Uptime Monitoring – We start with the absolute basics. Set up monitoring to ping your site every few minutes and alert you if anything goes down. We recommend Better Stack (10 monitors free) or Uptime Robot (50 monitors free). Don’t forget SSL and domain expiration monitoring too!

Backups (The More, The Better!) – Never rely on just your host’s backups. We recommend at least two backup methods, ideally three or more. Make sure your backups are stored off-site – you don’t want all your eggs in one basket if your host implodes.

Broken Link Checking – Nobody likes hitting a 404 page, and Google doesn’t either. Regular checks of your internal and external links keep both users and search engines happy.

Software Updates – The golden rule of security: keep everything updated. We chat about using staging environments, checking changelogs, and why major version updates need extra caution.

Vulnerability Checks – Stay ahead of security threats with systems that compare your plugins against vulnerability databases. We mention Patchstack’s clever “virtual patching” feature.

Form Testing – Simple but crucial. Test your forms regularly because there’s nothing worse than missing leads due to a broken contact form.

Google Search Console Monitoring – Set it up and monitor those notifications. Most are noise, but that 1% of genuine issues can be goldmines for fixing ranking problems.

Visual Checks – Nothing beats good old-fashioned human eyeballs. Jump on your site in incognito mode every few days to make sure everything looks and works as it should.

The Bottom Line

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all this (and fair dinkum, it is a lot!), remember that many web agencies handle all these maintenance tasks for you (check out our website hosting and support plan!). Sometimes it’s worth investing in professional help so you can focus on running your business.

Got questions about website maintenance? Drop us a line – we’d love to help!