Website Annual Maintenance Tasks 
by Christina Hills
By taking the time to update, optimize, and edit your website, you’ll attract more visitors, improve user experience, and boost your search engine rankings.
Remember, visitors don’t spend a long time on your website. If there’s a broken link, missing image, slow speed, or any other issue, they’re likely to click away to another site.
If you have your own website, you should have a checklist of things that you do on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis to keep your site in top-notch shape. After all, it’s one of the most important marketing tools in your business.
Do a Backup First
Before doing anything, run a backup of your website. A website backup is a copy of your website’s files and database that can be used to restore your website in case of a disaster or data loss.
Regular website backups are essential to protect data and content. Use a backup plugin or service to schedule regular backups and store them in a secure location. This will give you peace of mind and ensure that you can quickly recover from any unexpected issues.
Here are a few key tasks to keep your website fresh and functioning well!
7 Steps for Website Maintenance:
1) Run Updates
Identify and run any necessary updates to your plugins, themes, and WordPress version (in that order). These updates often contain security patches and bug fixes. It’s important to keep everything up-to-date so your website remains secure and functioning properly. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out my article on how to update your WordPress website.
2) Check for Broken Links
Broken links are frustrating to visitors and will hurt your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Use a link checker tool to scan your website for any broken links and fix them as soon as possible. Then, you can deactivate the link checker plugin until the next time you want to scan for broken links.
Your visitors will spend more time perusing your website if they don’t run into broken links and missing images.
3) Proofread Your Text
Poor grammar, spelling mistakes, and typos will make your website look unprofessional and hurt your credibility. Fortunately, today’s technology tools for writing make it easy to catch these errors. Grammarly, Hemingway, WordTune, and Yoast SEO will help identify grammar and spelling errors, and opportunities to make your writing more clear and concise. These tools can save you time and help you produce higher-quality content for your website.
Proofreading your website’s text and making any necessary changes will improve the overall quality of your content. As a result, your visitor will have a better experience!
4) Add Featured Images to Your Pages or Posts
Double-check that all your pages and posts have a featured image! WordPress uses the featured image in different ways, depending on the theme you’re using. For example, your featured image will be at the top of the page/post, as a thumbnail on the blog page, and in the blog post category pages. Plus, social media uses the featured image when you post the link to that particular page or post.
Featured images are important for engaging your website visitors. It’s the first image that the visitor will see on the page or post, so it should be eye-catching and relevant.
5) Review Your Website’s Content
Take some time to check your website for outdated information or missing images. One easy way to make sure your articles keep ranking in Google is to update alt-tags and descriptions on your images. Then, look at your blog post excerpts and make sure you have a short description of your article in there.
Keeping your content fresh and relevant can help improve your website’s search engine rankings and keep visitors engaged.
Also, try out a tool like ChatGPT to freshen up your content! You can copy and paste text directly into ChatGPT, and ask the AI tool to proofread or change the tone or length of the text.
6) Optimize your Website Speed
Website speed is a critical factor for user experience and search engine optimization. Slow-loading websites will frustrate visitors and cause them to leave your site. Use a tool like Google’s Pagd eSpeed Insights to analyze your website’s speed and identify areas for improvement.
Some common optimizations include compressing images, minifying code, and enabling caching. Just a note, browser caching is different from website caching. In addition to adding a caching plugin, you may want to consider a CDN Network for your hosting (this is a techie article).
One of the most important factors in speed is the hosting company you choose.
7) Check for Mobile Responsiveness
Is your website easily viewable and usable on mobile devices? With more and more people accessing the internet on their smartphones and tablets, it’s important your website is optimized for mobile.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you could be missing out on a lot of potential traffic and customers!
Also, be sure to review our full glossary of website-building terms. It’s a great place to start if you run into WordPress terms you don’t understand.