This blog is a follow-up to a post from January 23, 2015 on web analytics and SEO tools.
Keeping your site up-to-date is a task in itself, especially when you add on increased traffic, security vulnerabilities/updates and making it user-friendly to your visitors. We want to help ease your mind with our 12 month web bliss process to break down each step and stay on top of your site's performance:
January
Gather data
It's vital to know who is using your site and what they are looking at. You'll be able to make informed decisions on what content needs improvement, what you should continue doing, and what is no longer working. Hook a tool like Google Analytics to your site for user tracking. Research tools like Google Webmasters Portal to improve site performance and testing tools. Sign up for SEO tools like Moz and StatCounter to make improvements for a higher ranking on search sites.
February
Early spring cleaning
Now you understand where visitors are coming from, it's time to make sure to resolve any errors they might experience. This is a good time to review your logs for errors. Tools like Sentry or New Relic are easy to install to be proactive by providing notifications when new problems arise.
March
Get ready for more traffic
With errors resolved, your site needs to be quick - visitors don't want to sit around and wait for your content to load. You can improve your site performance with caching, using a CDN, or even optimizing your page loads. The faster the visitor can see your content, the more likely they will remain on your website and continue searching for more information rather than going to your competitor.
April
Focus on the user experience
Moz and StatCounter have a few months' worth of data, so April is a great time to check out the numbers. How many visitors are you getting from mobile devices? It's probably more than you expect. Having a responsive site makes browsing on mobile a much easier experience, and keeps user retention high.
May
Improve your SEO ranking
Tools like Moz will run weekly checks to see where your site's SEO is ranking among major search sites. By
canonicalizing your URLs you'll be able to reduce duplicate content issues and highlight important pages in search results.
If you're retiring old pages, don't delete them just yet! Search engines will still try to find them, and deleting them can cause issues with your ranking. We recommend setting up redirects to your new content or a landing page when cleaning up old pages.
June
Drive visitors to your site(s)
Having engaging and fresh content is a great way to encourage visitors to regularly visit your site. An online editorial calendar is a great place to start to plan your content and schedule new posts. Tools like Loomly or Hootsuite making scheduling quick and easy to give you more time to go back to your clients and projects.
July
Monitor and adjust
You should see an increase in traffic with more content, so keeping an eye on your uptime and issue response time should be a priority. Pingdom is a great tool for several different kinds of monitoring, and Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a great place to start.
August
Maintain your system
By August, your content is in order and your site has stats on visitors. This is a good time to check and ensure your database is packed regularly and your logs are rotated. You can also take things a step further by reviewing your RAM and CPU usage. Being proactive this month will greatly pay off in the log run maintenance of your system.
September
Protect
It's never a good time to lose all of the hard work you've put into improving your site. Take time this month to ensure your web assets are backed up, and backed up effectively in case of an issue or if you need to restore. Tools like CrashPlan and Tarsnap are great for keeping your data safe. It's worth testing these systems heavily, so we recommend testing their recoverability before you lose the luxury of testing.
October
Check your resiliency
Quality Assurance is a step that can't be stress-tested enough. With your backups in place and tested, try failing your site over and over again. Press all of the buttons, submit the forms, click through the links, try all of the browsers, and simply try to make something break. Don't just take your tech team's word for it.
November
Stay vigilant
Make sure you are running the latest vulnerability patches to avoid any interruptions in service or user security. Another steps is to sign up for the security mailing lists for the software applications you use. These will keep you in the know about any upcoming updates and issues to be aware of so you are not blindsided by the news.
December
Keep up
Get ready for the holidays, and get ready to repeat this process next year. Sign up for and read Six Feet Up's newsletter to stay up to date on web trends, tools and security updates.
With all of these pieces in place each month, your team should be in a good place to stay on top of security patches, updates, and keep in top-shape for site visitors.
Do you have questions? We’re happy to help.
