10 Essential Site Maintenance Tasks for Peak Performance

If your last blog post was from 2019, it’s time for an update. Regularly refresh your content, tweak your keywords, and ensure your pages are optimized for search engines. Current and relevant content keeps people engaged and helps boost your rankings. 

If SEO seems overwhelming, consider hiring an SEO consultant to collaborate with your company on a strategy for addressing your site’s primary SEO challenges.  

5. Stay on Top of Security Checks 

Hackers don’t take a day off, so you shouldn’t either. Run regular security scans and apply patches right away. 

If you are on Sitefinity CMS, you already have solid security features like authentication mechanisms, role-based permissions, and data encryption. You can read more about these security features in Sitefinity’s whitepaper, Sitefinity CMS Security and Best Practices. 

If you want to be notified when security vulnerabilities are detected in Sitefinity, you can follow Progress Sitefinity on social media or join the Progress Community to receive alerts and notifications directly in your inbox. However, if you are working with a Sitefinity Partner, they should receive these notifications and proactively discuss the next steps, such as upgrading your Sitefinity CMS or applying a security patch.  

6. Fix Broken Links and Errors 

Broken links and site errors can significantly impact user experience and search engine rankings. When visitors encounter 404 errors, dead links, or broken images, they become frustrated, reduce credibility, and increase bounce rates.  

A site riddled with errors signals poor maintenance, making users less likely to trust your brand or return. Additionally, search engines like Google penalize sites with excessive broken links, as they disrupt crawling and indexing, ultimately harming your SEO performance. 

Regularly checking for and fixing broken links ensures a seamless navigation experience, improves website credibility, and helps retain visitors. Use tools like Google Search Console or Screaming Frog to quickly identify and resolve these issues.  While these tools are free, some paid tools will provide more data. You can also hire an SEO specialist to run a scan, find errors, and devise a plan to solve these issues. 

Addressing errors enhances page load speed and accessibility, ensuring users and search engines can efficiently navigate your site. Keeping your site error-free enhances engagement, increases conversions, and sustains a strong online presence. 

7. Make Sure Your Site Works (Well) on All Devices 

There are still a jaw-dropping number of websites that aren’t mobile-friendly or optimized for mobile usage. 

Over 60% of global website traffic is estimated to originate from mobile devices. Therefore, ensuring a positive user experience on your site for mobile users is crucial. 

While several tools are available for a quick mobile accessibility test, being accessible on mobile devices doesn’t necessarily mean your site is fully optimized for them. 

To optimize your website experience on all devices, work with a digital partner who understands UX, design, and development. This ensures that solutions to usability issues are considered from a creative and technical perspective. 

8. Test Your Site’s User Experience (UX) 

Although we touched on UX in our previous point, it is worth reiterating that if people struggle to find what they need on your site, they will leave. 

Tools available can provide insights on user behavior, such as where visitors click and how they navigate your pages. However, tools can only go so far. Although they are helpful for common UX issues, they lack contextual understanding of aspects like user intent, usability, and navigation. 

Getting a UX site audit from an expert ensures you catch issues that automated tools cannot and gives you a more thorough assessment that considers your site goals and objectives. 

9. Stay Compliant with Web Standards 

Accessibility and privacy laws are serious business. Ensure your site meets WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) for usability and follows privacy laws like GDPR if you collect user data. 

WCAG is an internationally recognized standard designed to make web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. Not only does following accessibility guidelines and including features like alt text for images, straightforward navigation, and readable fonts make life easier for those with disabilities, but it will improve the website experience for all users. 

Following accessibility guidelines can also indirectly improve SEO. Implementing accessibility best practices makes content easier for search engines to read, crawl, and digest. 

Free tools like WAVE, a web accessibility evaluation tool, can help quickly check your accessibility compliance.  If you want to ensure your website is ADA compliant, hiring a digital partner specializing in ADA/WCAG compliance is best. At Smooth Fusion, we leverage the power of automated testing alongside precise manual evaluations to ensure your website meets the highest compliance standards. 

10. Check Your Analytics and Adjust Your Strategy 

Don’t just guess what’s working—data-driven decisions are key to website success. Tools like Google Analytics, Sitefinity Insight, and other analytics platforms provide valuable insights into traffic trends, user behavior, bounce rates, and conversion paths. By regularly reviewing this data, you can identify which pages perform well, where visitors drop off, and how effectively your calls-to-action (CTAs) convert. 

Key Metrics to Monitor: 

• Traffic Sources: Understand where your visitors come from—organic search, social media, referrals, or paid ads. 
• User Behavior: Track how users navigate your site, which pages they engage with, and where they exit. 
• Conversion Rates: Measure how well your forms, CTAs, and eCommerce pages convert visitors into leads or customers. 
• Page Load Speed & Performance: Slow-loading pages can increase bounce rates and hurt SEO rankings. 

Once you better understand your metrics, you can tweak your strategy.  This might include optimizing high-traffic pages, fixing drop off points, enhancing SEO on underperforming pages, or finding ways to incorporate personalization to increase engagement.

Get Proactive Maintenance and Support

Proactive maintenance prevents costly issues and enhances site performance. Partnering with experts like Smooth Fusion for ongoing support and leveraging Progress Sitefinity CMS for seamless updates will ensure your website remains secure, fast, and engaging.