Does a website’s health decline? The answer is yes, and the sign is a dwindling ranking on the search engines. The journey to a successful website does not stop at a successful launch. As soon as it goes live, you have to be committed to maintenance tasks to retain your rank on the search engines.
The secret to a healthy website is regular SEO maintenance. To keep your website presence smooth and beneficial for your business, here are some maintenance techniques you need to employ.
- Keep your website growing
As your business grows and changes, the same should reflect on your website. Whether you have new employees or have introduced new products, your website should include this information.
With the help of a web agency, you can make such additions to keep your website fresh. For example, add new plugins to enhance the user experience and add new articles to keep your website alive.
- Check your website speed
Website speed is one of the ranking factors used by search engines. Not only does a slow web page frustrate users, but it can also lead to a high bounce rate and a declining rank. Conversely, healthy websites have quick loading times.
You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate the speed of your website and make changes to enhance it. For instance, you can minimize HTTP requests, compress files, enable browser caching, and reduce image size.
- Optimize your website for mobile
Mobile responsive websites are healthy and can boost your conversions. This is because the world has gone mobile, and more than half of the visitors on your website are using mobile devices like smartphones. Therefore, if your website is not mobile responsive, it will affect their experience and negatively impact your ranking.
Having a responsive website will get you more traffic, maximize social media referrals and increase your visibility. The ripple effect will be a high ranking on the search engine results pages.
- Ensure you don’t have broken links
Broken links occur when content is no longer available or when it changes. Broken links hurt the user experience and can dwindle your website traffic. Regularly analyzing your website for broken links and removing them will help maintain your website’s health.
Google Analytics can help you find broken links. Once you get the list of broken links, mark them and ask Google to fix them. To prevent the formation of broken links, create easy-to-read and simple URLs. When doing a website clean-up, ensure that you don’t delete images still in use from the library.
You can also create 301 redirects for pages that are no longer available.
Conclusion
Having a successful website is not a one-off event. Regular maintenance is necessary to keep your website search engine-friendly. Some of the techniques you can employ include optimizing your website speed, updating your website content, optimizing your website for mobile, and removing broken links. Maintaining the health of your website will retain your traffic.
