Website management is essential for maintaining a business’s online presence effectively. It ensures that a website remains updated, secure, and aligned with brand goals and directly impacts user experience, which can lead to increased traffic and higher conversion rates.
In this blog, we’ll cover the different types of website management, its essential steps, and the best tools available to help you streamline the process.
Table of Contents
- What Is Website Management?
- What Types of Website Management Are There?
- Why Is Website Management Important?
- How To Manage a Website in 10 Essential Steps
- Best Tools You Can Get for Website Management
- Successfully Manage a Website With a Reliable Managed Hosting Plan
- Website Management Takeaways: Why Managing Your Site Is Important
- Website Management FAQs
What Is Website Management?
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Website management consists of technical maintenance, design, and content updates, as well as running and guiding online marketing campaigns that, together, provide a cohesive, professional, and consistent website UX.
The objective of any web management effort is to improve the website’s performance, deliver a positive brand image, and motivate visitors to take the desired action on a website.
Web design and website development companies provide this type of maintenance in their scope of services.
What Types of Website Management Are There?
Website management covers multiple facets of maintaining and updating a website. The most common forms of managing a site include:
- Content optimizations: Producing new articles and blog content, optimizing images, updating outdated content, creating new pages, etc.
- Technical maintenance: Fixing issues, solving hosting roadblocks, creating backups, updating website plugins, monitoring of performance, etc.
- Analytics processes: Installing data tracking cookies, implementing third-party tracking tools, hot spot tracking, etc.
- SEO: Optimizing SEO tags, meta descriptions and alt tags, boosting mobile-friendliness, improving website speed, streamlining website architecture, submitting sitemaps, etc.
- Marketing funnel and UX: Simplifying navigation, creating a user journey roadmap, setting up sales funnel, creating landing pages and CTAs, etc.
Why Is Website Management Important?
Managing your website with precision and professionalism comes with multiple short-term and long-term benefits for any business, including:
- Preparation for future growth: Effective website management practices ensure that you will be able to scale your business online.
- Cutting down the costs of downtime: Bad website management — or no website management at all — results in website issues that can prove very costly, from entirely losing your website to having to create it all over. Major downtime can be particularly costly for eCommerce websites that depend on daily revenue generation. Web management ensures this does not happen or, if it happens, the remedy is quick and efficient.
- Cost-effective efficiency: Website management tools and processes help businesses cut down costs by streamlining tasks that lead to improving your website experience and facilitating work practices and collaboration.
How To Manage a Website in 10 Essential Steps
There are 10 essential steps to managing a website that ensure it remains functional, user-friendly, and aligned with your business goals.
- Website and data backup
- Optimize website databases
- Monitor and improve website loading speed
- Manage website downtime
- Eliminate excess website elements
- Make sure your online forms are not vulnerable
- Optimize your landing pages
- Check your site’s performance on all devices
- Check your analytics
- Get managed cloud hosting
1. Website and Data Backup
Websites can be vulnerable to security breaches, cyberattacks, and server setbacks, which is why it’s vital to back up your website’s files on a regular basis.
In case a website’s core files are corrupted or even deleted by a malicious attack, having a recent backup can restore your website to a previous version when it was operational. This saves you from potential major losses and reduces downtime.
Backing up a website helps:
- Prevent the loss of data: If you or a hacker deletes some of your website’s data, a backup file can help restore it and resume the normal operation of your website.
- Avert the need to rebuild a lost website: Large websites, with hundreds or thousands of pages, that have been active for years can particularly be affected by a severe loss of data. A fresh backup file ensures you always have the latest version of your website ready to be deployed.
- Reduce the revenue loss: For eCommerce websites that bring revenue through sales, every second of a downtime eats into your profits. The most recent backup, quickly deployed, reduces the downtime and, by extension, saves your earnings.
There are numerous backup services that you can find online, including iDrive, pCloud, and Backblaze Business. However, elaborate and comprehensive website hosting plans also come with tools and services for making backups.
2. Optimize Website Databases
Websites like online stores, which frequently add and update products, often have large databases that store all the necessary information.
Regularly optimizing these database files is crucial for several reasons:
- It helps your site load faster
- You can save database space
- It strengthens the security of your site data
The best way to optimize your database files is to use special software such as EverSQL, ApexSQL Plan, or Toad SQL Optimizer for Oracle, among others.
3. Monitor and Improve Website Loading Speed
As your website grows, its database can become larger and more complex, which can affect the website’s loading speed. How fast your website loads is crucial; it influences both user experience and your search engine ranking. For instance, slower loading times lead to increased bounce rates and decreased conversions.
In addition to large database files, several other factors contribute to slowing your website down, including:
- An excess number of plugins: This creates more lines of code in your website’s admin section. More lines of code mean more server requests on your site’s hosting platform.
- High traffic: As your web traffic grows, your server has to process a large number of requests, which slows down your site’s load time.
- Server performance: If you use a shared server that hosts numerous other websites and manages HTTP requests to multiple pathways, it will affect your website’s performance.
- Too many graphics: Image-heavy websites, such as eCommerce sites with plenty of products, also create additional HTTP requests on your server.
To test your website speed, you can use tools such as PageSpeed Insights, UpTrends, or GTMetrix. Go over the report generated by any of these tools and identify issues that may be affecting your website speed in order to address them.
4. Manage Website Downtime
Your website can be inaccessible and unavailable for a certain duration of time for numerous reasons, most commonly the ones below:
4.1. Website Hosting Issues
Depending on your provider’s hosting plan, your website can be hosted on a dedicated server with professional 24/7 support to make sure your website suffers minimal downtime. It can also be hosted on a server with multiple other websites. However, this may cause more frequent downtimes and longer resolution times for issues.
4.2. Hardware Breakdown
Whether due to damaged ISP network cables, an overheating server processor, or a power outage, a good deal of downtime situations are down to hardware malfunction. This can happen despite any protective measures you may have in place.
4.3. Cyberattacks
There are multiple types of malware, hacker, and malicious attacks online — two of which are particularly risky for website owners:
- DDoS Attacks: Denial of Service attacks flood the website’s server with requests and, as each server has the capacity to process a certain number of requests, a huge number of these false requests can crash the server, making your website unavailable to “real,” valuable visitors.
- Bots: Black hat bots detect security vulnerabilities, exploit these weaknesses, and penetrate servers and websites to shut them down.
To be prepared for and manage web downtime, make sure you:
- Verify if your website is down: In some cases, your website might only appear down to you. Use your browser’s incognito mode or try accessing it from other places. Alternatively, use websites like isitdownrightnow.com or similar to get an accurate assessment of your website’s availability.
- Contact your hosting service provider: Sometimes, when servers perform regular maintenance, they will notify clients via email. If this is not the case, contact your hosting provider to see if the issue is on their end.
- Identify issues on your end: If the issue isn’t with the hosting provider, you’ll need to investigate potential causes of your website’s downtime. You can do this by checking the backend activity log for any unauthorized entry or examining your server files for any changes or unfamiliar files that may have been infected by malware.
5. Eliminate Excess Website Elements
Sometimes, a website’s performance is hindered by too many plugins, software add-ons, and other elements such as spam comments and unoptimized content changes that slow it down.
Your website needs occasional cleaning to get rid of this unnecessary software and content components. There are numerous tools at your disposal for cleaning a website of surplus elements, such as Autoptimize and WP-Optimize.
6. Make Sure Your Online Forms Are Not Vulnerable
If your website has online subscription or comment submission forms, a search bar, or a checkout page, these can serve as potential entry points for malware that hackers can inject into your website.
One common technique hackers use is SQL injection, which allows them to gain unauthorized access to your website’s database. To protect your site, it’s crucial to check your website forms for vulnerabilities that could be exploited. You can use available tools such as Acunetix to identify breaches or weaknesses in website forms.
7. Optimize Your Landing Pages
If you have landing pages where visitors land after clicking on a paid ad, social media post, or organic search result, it’s very important to keep that page optimized and running smoothly.
Potential issues your visitors can experience when they arrive on your landing page include:
- Slow-loading page due to heavy traffic
- Web server glitch
- The product or service is no longer available
- The messaging doesn’t provide a clear picture of what you are offering
Several online tools, such as Unbounce, VWO Landing Page Analyzer, and AdWordsRobot can help optimize your website to increase conversions. These tools provide reports on strategies to improve your site, analyze all landing pages associated with your online campaigns, and evaluate your pages based on relevance, goal focus, and other criteria.
8. Check Your Site’s Performance on All Devices
Even if your website was initially designed for compatibility across various devices and browsers, updates such as new plugins, content uploads, and code changes may have impacted its appearance and performance.
These changes may affect the way your website looks or performs on a particular device or browser. And that, as you can imagine, may lead to negative UX and perception of your business.
Therefore, it is important to regularly test your website on multiple devices to ensure optimal performance for all users. You can use tools such as Katalon, LambdaTest, or TestComplete.
9. Check Your Analytics
Metrics like click-through rates, visitors’ location, bounce rates, daily traffic volume, and dwell times are all available in your website’s analytics section. These provide an insight into how your website is performing and highlight areas for improvement.
Regularly checking your analytics report helps you improve your website strategy and determine which changes or steps to take next.
Other than the widely used Google Analytics, you can also explore tools such as Domo, Zoho Analytics, and others to get in-depth data on your website’s performance.
10. Get Managed Cloud Hosting
Website hosting is an essential consideration when it comes to how your website is performing and what steps you can take to manage it. It affects the website loading speed, its safety, expansion capabilities and scalability, as well as what plugins you can implement to enhance the website’s appeal and content.
Additionally, the right hosting plan is crucial for maintaining backup files. Different hosting service providers offer various backup options, and some can even perform backups at intervals you specify.
If your online business is experiencing increased daily traffic, you require a more robust hosting solution that can make your website management easier.
Best Tools You Can Get for Website Management
Using the right tools for website management can make a significant difference in efficiency and effectiveness. Whether it’s optimizing content for search engines, securing the site, or improving performance, having the proper resources is essential.
Below are some of the best website management tools that can help ensure your site runs smoothly.
- WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) available. The CMS offers flexibility and a wide range of customization plugins. Businesses can easily create, edit, and manage content without needing advanced technical skills.
- Google Analytics helps track website traffic and user behavior. This tool provides in-depth insights into audience demographics, bounce rates, and traffic sources. These metrics are valuable for improving overall website performance and reaching business goals.
- GTmetrix is a performance analysis tool that tracks a website’s speed and loading times. It provides actionable recommendations to improve website performance. Monitoring these metrics ensures users have a smooth browsing experience.
- Sucuri is a robust security tool designed to protect websites from cyberattacks. You can use it to monitor for malware, unauthorized access, and other security vulnerabilities. With its firewall protection, Sucuri helps maintain website integrity and prevents potential threats.
- UpdraftPlus is a backup tool designed to safeguard a website’s data. It allows automatic scheduling of backups to the cloud or local storage. With the ability to restore websites quickly, UpdraftPlus provides peace of mind in case of system failures.
Successfully Manage a Website With a Reliable Managed Hosting Plan
A cost-effective way to ensure you have the necessary website management capabilities at your service is through a managed cloud hosting platform such as Cloudways.
Cloudways is especially suitable for growing agencies and eCommerce businesses. It provides 24/7 support that will help your in-house team with any website management-related issue you may have.
The solution’s high-speed performance, built-in advanced caches, and enterprise CDN, along with SSD-based hosting are just some of the features its clients get to enjoy. Other benefits include:
- Intuitive and easy-to-use user interface
- Team collaboration availabilities
- 24/7 server monitoring
- Multiple integrations and plugins
- Managed security with dedicated firewalls, bot protection
- Server management versatility
Cloudways has several flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing tiers that provide different capabilities that are customized based on your specific requirements.
It begins with the choice of five different cloud hosting plans that companies can fully scale up or down, depending on their operational costs. Each of these comes with its own set of pricing tiers, ranging from $11 monthly for the most basic DigitalOcean plan to $37 monthly for the advanced Google Cloud hosting plan.
Website Management Takeaways: Why Managing Your Site Is Important
Website management involves a series of methods and processes that webmasters and website managers use to ensure their websites remain up-to-date, professional, and functional.
Aside from ensuring general security and technical maintenance, managing a website also includes the following tasks:
- Performing maintenance
- Implementing design updates
- Planning and delivering content updates
- Implementing marketing strategies
- Updating website security
- Providing web support to staff and customers
- Planning for future growth in both domestic and international markets
- Achieving a consistent user experience across channels
- Ensuring content can be reused in various contexts
Website Management FAQs
1. How much does website management cost?
Website management costs vary significantly depending on the complexity and size of your website. Small websites can cost between $5 and $200 per month. On the other hand, larger or more complex eCommerce sites might require $500 to $5,000 or more monthly, depending on the level of maintenance needed.
2. Is managed hosting better than managing a website yourself?
Managed hosting is generally better for businesses that want expert handling of their website’s technical aspects. It offers convenience, specialist support, and security enhancements that reduce the time and effort needed compared to managing a site independently.
