Website Maintenance

It is important to keep your website up to date and error-free. Doing this will require you or the third party you hire to monitor the use of your business website, add or remove information as needed, and correct any errors that may occur.

Maintenance is extremely important once you have your website developed and have made it live. People will quickly stop visiting a website that has errors or old and incorrect information.

Monitoring Use

Monitoring the use of your website will allow you to determine how effective your site is. There are several methods available for measuring the usage of your website.

• Logs – There are several different types of logs, but their purpose is to record all activity on a website.
• Visits – These provide a count of the number of times users access a webpage.
• Hits – A hit occurs when an attempt is made to retrieve a page or file from a website.
• Cookies – These are small data fragments left on a user's computer by a website used to track a web session.

Several software products exist to assist you with monitoring the use of your website. Most hosting services provide log analysis software. If your hosting service does not, or you wish to use different software, your choice of software will depend on the amount of information you wish to monitor. As the complexity of your website increases, you will probably want to increase the amount of information that you monitor. Use your web monitoring software to develop periodic reports that you can analyze.

Website monitoring will help you decide what types of updates you should make to your site. For instance, if you notice that a particular page is not generating many hits, then you should consider why that is and how it may be fixed. Ask yourself whether the page in question may just not interest anyone, or instead, is it possible that people visiting your site are unable to find the page altogether. Your answer will result in your taking steps to either remove the page or to make changes to your site so that it is easier to find the page and its contents.