How to look after your website once it’s launched
Firstly, hugest congratulations on launching your website! Building a website is always a big project and if you’ve worked with a website designer, it may have a big investment too. But now that it’s live, now what?
How can you make sure your brand new website stays working properly, and actually helps move your business forward?
I have to start off by breaking some news to you - unfortunately, websites are not a one and done thing. They require maintenance and upkeep to ensure you are getting the best results from your website.
That’s exactly what this blog post will help you to do - keep your website in tip-top shape once you finally make it live.
Free Website Care Guide
To support you with this, I have created a FREE Website Care Guide - its one of the resources I provide to my PAYING clients but I wanted to share it with you for free. Simply click here to download your free website care guide.
How To Look After Your Website Once It’s Live
Keep your website up to date
Firstly and most importantly, its essential that you understand you have to keep your website up to date. It should grow as your business grows. One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners making is building a website months/years ago and they haven’t updated it since. But business changes quickly and so should your website.
You should be making updates regularly and your website should reflect your CURRENT business. This could include:
Your offers/services/products
Your up-to-date pricing
Latest testimonials
Latest case studies
Recent headshots (no photos of you from 5 years ago please!)
Latest news & updates
Offers and promotions
These are the types of things that need to stay up to date on your website as your website is often the first port of call for your customers.
Check your mobile site when making changes
With updating your own website comes the need to always be checking the mobile version of your website. Whenever you make a change to your site, check what it looks like on a mobile phone too. I say this one from experience - I have built plenty of websites for clients who make changes by themselves and forget to check the mobile version. That’s when things get stretched, squished, overlap or just look plain crazy.
So every time you make a change to your website - remember to check your mobile version too!
Compress any images before uploading them
As you’re making changes to your website, there will probably come a time when you have to upload a new photo/picture to your website. When that time comes, you want to make sure you’re properly compressing your photos. This basically means making the photo smaller so its file size is smaller and can load faster on your website.
Photos are one of the biggest culprits for slowing down a website, but its a super simple fix. You can use a free tool like tinypng.com to compress your images and make them load a lot faster on your website.
It might surprise you to know that compressing photos is just ONE step in uploading photos to your site properly. Check out this guide to learn the 3 other things you need to look out for when uploading photos to your website.
Create blog post content consistently
Blogging is one of the best ways to grow your website’s traffic and customers. As a great SEO and marketing tool, I highly recommend sharing blog posts on your website fairly regularly. It doesn’t need to be every week, but every month or so is perfect.
It shows your customers that you’re still in business and it shows Google your website is up to date and still relevant.
Stuck for blog post ideas? Check out these 17 blog post ideas to help you land clients.
Have a strategy to get backlinks to your website
If you have any hopes of ranking in Google - you need to start getting backlinks to your website. Backlinks are links from other websites to your website, which helps Google to understand that your website is trustworthy and worth reading. You can think of backlinks like votes of confidence from other website owners. If lots of other people like your website enough to link to it, then it must be a pretty good website, right?
That’s why it should be a key goal when it comes to growing your website and its chances of ranking in Google.
But how on earth do you go about getting backlinks to your website? Here are some ideas to help get you started:
Be featured on a podcast
Write a guest blog post article on someone else’s blog
Take part in an interview
Join an online directory for your industry
Create a research piece that is valuable & worth linking to
Be featured in the press e.g. using a tool like HARO
SEO optimise new pages if you’re confident
Speaking of SEO (search engine optimisation), if you’re fairly confident with editing your wesbite, you want to consider making some SEO optimsiations. This could include adding keywords to your website text, adding alt-text to your images and adding meta titles/descriptions to your pages. If that all sounds like gibberish to you - you might want to check out my article an introduction to SEO for beginners here.
Review your website analytics
Once your website is live - how can you actually tell it is performing well? That’s where your website analytics come in. Whether you’re using a tool like Google Analytics or the built in analytics on your website platform, its always a good idea to check in frequently. It helps you to understand how much people are visiting your website, what are your most popular pages and can help you identify what is/isn’t working on your website.
I typically recommend checking in as part of your monthly/quarterly business reviews or having a “website love day” where you make sure everything is up to date and deep dive into the numbers.
Keep up to date with privacy laws
Privacy laws are always changing and if your website has visitors from across the world - you need to make sure your privacy policies and privacy tools are up to date. This includes reviewing your policies are up to date, ensuring your cookie consent tool/policies reflect any new tools you’ve connected to your website and ensuring your contact details are up to date.
To manage this, I highly recommend using the tool Termageddon* - an auto-updating privacy policy & cookie consent tool. Using a tool like this means you don’t have to keep up to date with changing privacy laws, because your policies will automatically update as privacy laws change. Talk about peace of mind. If you use the code “FREYA” you can get 10% off your first year’s subscription. *This is an affiliate link which means I get a small commission if you use my link, but just know I only recommend this tool because I use and love it personally.
Send people to your website!
If you’re launching a website for the first time, it’s down to you to drive traffic to your website. Unfortunately Google isn’t going to start showing your website right away which means you’ll need to get creative and start sharing it with as many people as possible. This includes sharing it on your social media, in your email footer and on your business cards. To help you get started with this, check out the article 21 FREE ways to drive traffic to your website.
Want help keeping your website up to date?
I’m so glad you asked. As a Squarespace website designer, I offer comprehensive website maintenance packages to my clients to help you keep your website up to date. You just send me the techy to-dos you need help with, and I’ll get them done quickly for you. So if you want support uploading new blog posts, building freebie automations or SEO-optimising your website, I’d love to support you with this. Click here to get in touch or click here to hear what other past clients have to say about working with me.
