Website Maintenance Guide - Why And How Share your knowledge and experience with us

Even if you are running a popular website with thousands of hits per month, you need to invest time for maintaining your site. Website maintenance has different aspects to consider and each one of it is important.

Why do we need to spend time for website maintenace?

Maintaining a website has never been a simple task and some webmasters may be reluctant to get into that troublesome affair every now and then or periodically even. But it is a must to do like thing. The best part of a website that draws visitors is the fresh updated relevant contents. It helps in building trust as well. So leaving every thing behind, you need to consider content improvement periodically to show your visitors fresh and latest information. Your content must change, and that must head towards betterment after each updates. That is the key for getting return visits.

But that is only the one side of the story. Actual site maintenance should follow a stipulated schedule and it involves different actions.

Check for Broken/Dead links:

Think in terms of your visitors. How much frustrated will they be, if they find pages containing broken links. When you are reading an article in some other website and in the references part you find few more urls to explore deep into that subject; you click one and get an HTTP 404 Error Message. You end up with dire frustration and may even decide not to return back to that site anymore. It may happen to the visitors of your sites as well. Whenever they will encounter a broken/dead link, it will stimulate a sense of irritation in their mind, and you can understand the frustrating offshoot.

When and how frequent?

If you own a small website, once in a fortnight or month will do. There are lots of free tools to check for broken/dead links, so use them with cheers and update links accordingly. However for big sites, containing thousands of pages, you need to employ more sophisticated maintenance strategy to check for presence of such undesired links. You may consider checking each section/category periodically instead of checking the entire site as a whole.

This is a tool for checking dead or broken links that you may like to try.

Update sitemap

Your sitemap should be updated prefferably each time you add a new page to your site. However, you may consider updating your sitemap once in a week depending upon the gravity of the changes. If you are using Google Sitemap.xml or Yahoo-type urllist.txt , update it frequently as well.

Database maintenace:

Whether you are using a content management system, or you have developed one for your own use, database maintenance is a must if your site stores content in database. You need to optimise your tables for performance enhancement from time to time. You may consider changing queries a little bit to show few more extra information, or adding a field in an existing table or creating a new table altogether to meet up your visitors ever changing needs. Database maintenace, however, requires some sort of technical knowledge and attempting any change without knowing much about the effect, may cause irreversible damage to your site. So you must take enough care.

Site Backups:

Told so many times in the internet, probably in each forum for webmasters, and there is really no substitute for site backup. Backup your site periodically. Whenever you make some changes in content or in queries, keep the backup. In case there is some trouble, simply restore the backed up files to keep your site running.

For each webmaster, site backup is as important as taking up your daily dose medicines.

Site backup may be handled in two ways:

1. Script backup :

Before making any changes to your existing scripts, keep a backup copy of that. It includes files like CSS/ .htaccess / robots.txt /sitemap.xml files. Infact it applies to each and every scripts in your webpage.

2. Database backup :

Depending upon your site updates and visitors activity you have to schedule a database backup.

Security Checks:

This is one of the most haunting issue in modern day's web publication. If you need/want to learn more about security issues visit this page :http://www.cgisecurity.com/

Even if you are using an existing CMS, you need to keep a watch on the security holes discovered therein from time to time and update patches as and when they are released. You are definitely going to get such security related information in the support forums of the CMS you are using.

This is just a starter, Xisto forum members may like to share their knowledge and experience in this topic so that it may come up as a complete website maintenace guideline.

Regards,

Sid

I would have to agree with quite a bit of that.Keeping a website updates is definately a good thing to do. Periodically optimising your tables is also a very good suggestion, I do this every few days (force of habit).Incremental improvements is also a very good idea. A new tutorial/article/news piece, file etc. Or even small things like signatures to a custom forum.Security is most certainly a problem and can also sometimes be a real pain to tackel *the right way* or atleast a way that works well. (if anyone has any good reading material on security concerning PHP/mySQL i'd appreciate it).I also think that Site validation under some standard such as HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0/1.1 is a great thing to do aswell, and to use your metatag description and keyword attributes properly (and perhaps revise them from time to time).I also keep my sitemap.xml file up to date as much as possible for Google Sitemaps (i haven't done yahoo, I thought you had to pay for it or something).

A website needs be validated for:

1. Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML

2. RSS/Atom feeds (if any)

3. CSS stylesheets

So, if you are implementing changes in HTML/XHTML documents, RSS/Atom feeds or in CSS Stylesheet - you need to check for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards - each time you make such changes.

So far as Yahoo is concerned, it allows you to submit urls from your website through site feed. As suggested by Yahoo, the format is

 

A text file containing a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line. The filename of the URL list file must be urllist.txt; for a compressed file the name must be urllist.txt.gz

 

 

Remember though, that the most important part of validation is not passing validation, but that your code is valid. For example, browser specific (proprietary) css tags do not pass validation, even properly formed ones that are listed in recommendations. So if you use them, your site will not pass validation, although it will be valid.~Viz