If you are thinking about blogging, or perhaps you already own a blog, then you are going to need to learn about how to maintain it. Maintaining a blog can be quite time consuming, but overall it is necessary if you are going to have a successful site.
Just to preface this post – we are going to be discussing mainly WordPress sites. If you are using WIX or Squarespace or if you built your own website, then some of these tips might not help you. The general idea is the same though.
In this post we are going to go over some of the general questions you might have about maintaining a blog like:
- What happens if you do not maintain it
- How to maintain a blog
- What is Site Health
- Common Problems
- Backups and Updates
Lets dive right into what happens if you do not maintain your blog.
What if you do not maintain your blog
What if you ignore your blog? Well lets look at it like this:
If you have a car, and you do not change the oil what happens? Well, the car definitely will not go zoom for very long.
Likewise, if you do not maintain your blog, it will eventually stop running. It will sort of happen like this:
- Your site health will flag something wrong with your blog or something not updated
- It will start experiencing problems or not allowing you to do certain things
- The blog will slow down and start to crash unexpectedly
- Eventually, there will be a technical error and it could even get taken down
Now, all of these things can be fixed and easily avoided with some general rules. First, do not ignore things that are wrong with your website. These things can quickly stack up and cost you resulting in a:
- Drop in traffic
- Drop in Ad revenue
- blog posts being unavailable
- Plugins becoming corrupted
If any of the above happens, it can be very annoying to deal with and ultimately these things will effect the growth of your site. High website growth and ranking is the hardest thing to achieve and needs to be done consistently over time, so do not let these things happen to your site!
Maintain a Blog
So then, how do you maintain a blog?
It is actually quite simple. First you will need to become familiar with the backend of your site, but that should not take long. If you are using WordPress, like I mentioned above, the backend will alert you if things are going wrong with your site.
This is useful because it saves you the trouble of digging for problems. Most specifically, the backend of WordPress will give you a “site health” stat that you can use to gauge if you need to fix things or not.
Maintaining Site Health
Maintaining site health is vitally important. You can access the site health of your page simply by clicking onto Tools -> site health in your WordPress backend dashboard. Once you arrive on the page and it loads, there should be a list with everything currently wrong on your website.
If there are critical issues, then they need to be addressed immediately. These issues could be preventing your page from being live, keeping you from updating posts, or simply just be cosmetic errors. Most of the time the issue is that a plugin or theme needs to be updated.
Plugins get updated by their creators all the time to fix bugs, add on new features, or simply to fine tune the code. It is important that your site always has the most update-to-date versions to not conflict with anything on your site.
Most of the other issues that your site health stat points out will usually be non-vital but should still be addressed. Some of the time the issues can be more suggestive in nature and those can be ignored. At the end of the day, you need to always check this metric, fix these issues to the best of your ability, and make sure your site is in top shape.
Backups
Another feature of maintaining a website is to constantly back up your site.
In this post here, I describe why this is SO important. Believe me, you never want to wake up and see your site down without a backup. Most hosting providers will automatically create backups, but it is vital that you do some on your own as well.
Believe me when I say that this experience is frustrating and a huge headache. Save yourself the trouble and back up your website monthly if you can.
Maintaining a Website
Besides site health and backups, you will need to make sure a of a few more small things:
- Make sure the hosting is paid for and on renewal
- Confirm that your domain is on renewal and will never be sold
- Constantly look for bad links on your site and delete them
- Make sure questionable sites are not backlinking to your site – Google can penalize this
- Keep posts relevant and updated to keep them ranking
There is so much to do for a website, not including adding more content, building an email listing, building out social channels, and the general tasks. I suggest you work on your site daily if you want it to be successful. If not, then you probably will not see the return you are looking for.
Maintaining a Blog
Thanks for reading our post on how to maintain a blog. I hope these tips helped you in a small way. There is so much to do for a website, but if you take care of it and give it what it needs to grow you will not be disappointed.
