It is important to keep your website up to date and error free. Sites lose credibility if their content is not updated or links do not work.
There are a number of actions you should undertake regularly as part of your website maintenance to ensure that the image of your business does not suffer because of the poor performance or user perception of your site.
Checking links
You should regularly check the links on your website to ensure that they all work and that the content you are linking to is still relevant. If there are significant numbers of links, consider checking a portion of them per week as a rotating maintenance operation.
Ensure that any time-sensitive links are still current. It is annoying for your users to click on a link and find that the topic is no longer there or the special offer has expired.
Don't forget to check links to your own pages to ensure that every page is fully functional and that the internal content it is linking to remains relevant and up to date.
Checking advertising or sponsorship banners
If your website carries advertising or other types of sponsorship banner, eg affiliate marketing, you need to check that the merchant's link is still active. A common problem facing many website owners is a discontinued sponsor link, with your user clicking through and failing to reach the merchant's home page or campaign landing page - this can reflect badly on your website. Also ensure that the adverts that appear on your site are relevant to your website's audience.
Spelling and typos
Web designers will commonly use a syntax-checking program to catch grammatical errors and typos before the site is fully operational. However, you should also carry out such checks regularly once the site is live and as content is added.
Maintenance tools
There are a number of free and paid-for tools available online that you can use to assist in carrying out the various checks on your website. These tools can identify broken links, missing images, spelling mistakes and other problems that can damage user confidence and adversely affect your search engine ranking.