What are the common problems I will face with my website?
No matter how high-tech your website is, you will eventually run into some common issues.
USDP has been in the business of fixing website problems for almost a quarter of a century. While we’ve addressed a wide variety of issues over the years, there are several that we’ve seen time and time again.
Here are some problems to look out for and how you can fix or avoid them:
Maintenance fatigue
Keeping a website up to date is hard work, and the most common problem we see clients face is maintenance fatigue.
The website to-do list can get out of hand if not tackled on a regular basis. When problems persist unaddressed, or too much time goes by without fresh content, the effects can snowball. An out-of-date website quickly switches from an asset to a liability.
What you can do about this
Develop a simple maintenance schedule.
Having a schedule that you or your team can stick to will keep you honest about your progress. Create a list of tasks that need to happen daily, weekly, monthly, bi-anually, annually, etc. Breaking down maintenance and content updates into a trackable format will ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Maintenance tasks might include:
- Making sure the website is running for customers
- Checking for any malicious or bot traffic
- Updating team member information when people move on or join
- Making sure hosting licenses are paid for
- Checking that plug-ins are still working and updating older ones
- Confirming that customers can make purchases if you’re running eCommerce
- Uploading relevant content like blogs or announcements
- Ensuring that the user experience is still smooth
Hire Help
If that all sounds too overwhelming, you can hire someone to do it for you.
Many companies with significant needs choose to hire an agency that specializes in websites. With an agency on retainer, you’ll have your very own geek squad to call when you need tech support. An agency can assign developers to help you with your maintenance issues, fix code, monitor traffic, check your hosting configuration, and add more features as needed. Agencies can also create and upload relevant content to your website which keeps it up to date and gives credibility to your business.
If you don’t want to go the agency route you can hire an in-house person or team. With in-house help, you’ll have someone on staff who’s solely dedicated to website maintenance. Like a mini-agency, this person can focus their attention on the brand and streamline your website’s health and wellbeing.
Website and CMS overload
A website that is tinkered with by too many people can become a lot like your kitchen junk drawer. Your brand identity might start to feel unrecognizable, your content can get disorganized, and your CMS can become frustrating to use.
What you can do about this
Regulate who has website access.
As the old saying goes, “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the website…” or something like that. With a dedicated team or individual for website work, less will fall through the cracks and more will get done properly.
Maintain strict brand and content guidelines.
If your company doesn’t have a brand book, it might be a good idea to design one. Brand books translate the ethos and aesthetics of a company into everything it does, website included. You want your website to look and feel consistent in all the colors, fonts, content, and messaging.
Maintain strict plug-in governance
On WordPress, plug-ins can cause lots of problems if too many people are experimenting with them. Plug-ins directly affect the user experience and could “break” your website if not treated with care.
Set clear goals
Each week, month, and year, have a few goals for your website. These goals can be big or small, but any meaningful and deliberate progress is great! Some goals might include updating your team’s headshots, adding a new feature to your eCommerce site, posting more blogs and thought leadership pieces, or revising your messaging to better reflect your business plans.
Give clear ownership over website tasks to your team or your hired agency
Assign roles rather than look for volunteers. Without a leader who delegates, companies run the risk of website daydreams vs. website results.
Slow load time
While poor development quality often contributes to slow load times, even well-developed websites can be sluggish if not carefully maintained.
What you can do about this
Keep image sizes under 2MB when possible
Large images can slow down your site. Use Webp, SVG, and JPG formats when possible. Use a plugin like Smush if appropriate.
Cut down on “the fancy stuff” like animations
Animations can add to your website's “cool” factor, but they can be bad for performance. If your website’s style is getting in the way of its function, go back to basics. It’s important for the site to make a good impression, but if it doesn’t work well, that purpose is defeated.
Look into your hosting to make sure you are running on the proper configuration
The right hosting configuration can make a world of difference for your site speed. Read our guide on hosting preferences for more information.
Clear your cache
Clearing your cache can be a good practice from time to time. When you make updates to plug-ins, change content, rework a design element, or publish new content, your website will need to be refreshed in order to properly display the updates. Slow load time can be caused by broken links or corrupted files.
Bad SEO
Even a site that starts out with great SEO can eventually fall further down in the search rankings, typically as a result of the three problems listed above. SEO must be done as an ongoing mission.
What you can do about this
Stick to a well-researched content strategy
Make sure you’re constantly staying up to date on changes made to search engines like Google. Search engines are always adapting as new technology, like AI, becomes available. This will alter the way SEO performs and you’ll likely need to change your course to stay relevant. Pick a few marketing and SEO newsletters and read their content to stay in the loop. Keep tabs on press releases from search engine companies about updates to their software.
Use semantic structure
If AI can’t understand the flow of your webpage or provide a summary that makes sense to you, you might need to do some restructuring. Use clear, concise, and descriptive language when creating headings and subheadings for content on your website. Throw your homepage or blog post into your AI bot of choice and ask it to summarize. See how the updates have helped.
Avoid broken links
Broken links hurt your website’s performance and confuse your visitors. If you need to change a link, make sure you set up a redirect before you delete the content. Redirects tell the browser to grab content from the new link instead of the outdated one. This way you’ll preserve good traffic to your website.
Downtime
Nothing is more frustrating than when your website is repeatedly unavailable. That’s a guaranteed way to miss new business opportunities.
What you can do about this
Prevent this before it becomes a problem
Proactive website support is the key to avoiding downtime all together. By employing a geek squad or a marketing agency that can troubleshoot your tech issues, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that the experts are available to triage when they’re needed.
Look into your hosting configuration and consider switching providers
Depending on the size and age of your website, you might be in the market for an upgrade. Pivoting to a provider that can handle your unique combination of traffic, eCommerce, and data storage will be key to keeping your website up and running.
Inspect your code and backend
If the problem persists, have a developer poke around in your code base. It’s not always clear from the surface what could be causing your problems. Working from the inside out to diagnose any code issues, broken plug-ins, or misconfigurations is the best way to fix problems and prevent future ones. Addressing the cracks in the foundation of your website will increase its longevity.
Hopefully this brought some clarity to the often-confusing tasks of maintaining your website. The most important step you can take to maintain your website is to stay disciplined. Whether you handle maintenance in-house or outsource your web needs to an agency, make sure your team is operating with a clear plan and committed to your website’s success.
If you are looking to arm your web team with more knowledge, check out more of our frequently asked questions and blog postings.