If you’re an Indigenous business or professional and you have a website, this checklist is for you!

It’s easy to create a website then forget about it once you’re up and running.

Most of us love to put in the effort to make it look great and ensure clients can find you on the big wide web, but it’s just as important to keep updating your website and ensuring everything is running smoothly.

This checklist will help you stay on top of the small things you need to do to your website every week!

Check all links

It’s important that all links on your website are up to date and they lead to where those links are saying they will. If you have social media links on your page, check them to make sure that when you click on it they lead viewers to the right social media channels. This is the same for any other links that you may have put into other pages of your website. If you have a news page and you are linking to other websites – check this regularly. A lot of websites that you could be linking to may expire and you may need to remove these links. You can use websites such as https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ to help you locate any broken links on your website.

Remove any spam comments

If you have a blog or a news page with the option of comments at the bottom of your article, make sure you are checking these pages for any comments that may need to be removed or responded to.

Check for 404 errors

These are the type of errors that come up when a page doesn’t exist. If you have removed a page, or it is expired, this comes up. Go through many of the links on your website to ensure that they lead to a page and not a 404 error.

Check your website speed

Your website speed is important to your viewers and contributes to their experience as a customer or a client. If they have a great experience and all pages come up as soon as possible, with a fast speed, this leaves a great impression and they will most likely visit your page again. If your website speed is not up to standards and takes more time than necessary, use a tool such as solar wings pingdom to check your website speed.

View your website in different browsers

It’s important that your website can be open on all different internet browsers such as safari, chrome, as well as on your mobile and tablets. Your website must be able to be read and used on all these types of equipment and browsers. This is to ensure all your website viewers are able to access from any browser.

Back up your website

Backing up your website is essential. We can’t express how important this is to do on a regular basis so that you don’t lose all your hard work! There are many reasons why you should do this, including hackers, glitches or errors – anything can happen! To do this you can use a WordPress plugin such as https://ithemes.com/backupbuddy/, and https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/ or you can also do it manually.

Although it is time consuming, updating your website is crucial to your marketing efforts. Your website is the place where clients will first find you online and their experience on your site matters.

So make sure you use the weekly website checklist regularly to stay on top of it.