Website maintenance for health and beauty websites
Websites are designed to give you a face on the web, it’s a tool for accessing a different pool of potential customers. As with most things, your website will always need updates – in the same way you might care for a garden.
You probably spend hours outside pulling weeds, cleaning the paving stones and re-arranging plants for the best sunlight spots. Thankfully, maintaining your website isn’t exactly the same, it’s not nearly as intensive as a garden but it does need you to tend to it on a regular basis to make sure it’s functioning correctly.
In this post we want to go through some of the major website maintenance jobs that you will need to do for your health and beauty business. Some of the tips in this blog will work for all websites regardless of the sector, others are a little more specific to those with eCommerce shops or changing product lines.
What happens if I don’t update my website?
As a quick bullet point list, here are some of the negatives that you and your customers might experience if you don’t maintain your website.
- Problems with pages not loading (404 errors or slow loading pages).
- Shipping and other customer service issues.
- Being pushed down the search engine rankings and losing valuable eyes on your website.
- Readers may not find the information they expect from you and go with other options.
- Loss of trust in your business.
What do you need to update?
WooCommerce
Although the plugin WooCommerce generally stays static through the year in terms of changes, there are a couple of things that you want to make sure you keep updated. Firstly, the shipping rates that you offer might need to be adapted through the year, you’ll want to make sure this is always kept up to date. Secondly, if you use Facebook for selling, you need to check to see that the link between the two is still working for your customers.
Seasonal Events
This section covers any information on your website that needs to be updated according to the changing seasons. These will reflect the campaigns that your business runs through in the year. Some examples will include:
- Nutritionists – running sessions for weight loss in the summer, healthy eating in the winter.
- Nail Technicians and Makeup Professionals – Selling different products through the year and keeping up with the latest trends (I see you there summer pastels…)
- Mental Health Professionals – Wellness retreat updates, Winter supplements.
Those are just a few examples that we thought of off the top of our heads but there are probably many more that you’ll want to filter into your website through the year.
Comments
Comments may or may not be enabled on your website. If you DO have them turned on you should pop into the back end of your website to filter through the comments that people have made. You can then decide which ones you want to publish, and which ones are spammy or distracting. Whilst you do this you should also take the time to respond to any that are asking genuine questions or starting a conversation with you.
Analytics
One of the things that can be beneficial for you is doing a regular check up of your website analytics. It’s not a great idea to get hung up on this data on a day to day basis but a monthly glance over can give you some insight into how your content is being perceived, which areas of the website are performing the best or the demographics of people landing on your pages. This analytics data can then inform the next moves for your website, content and business.
Page, Article or Blog Updates
As time moves forward, so do businesses. One of the things that can easily be changed to reflect that is content updates. This will be important if you are changing events you are running, adding new services or products to your offering or have a lot of outdated content on your blog. If you fall into this category it might be worth having a look through all the pages, articles and blogs and redacting or updating information that is no longer relevant.
Keep in mind: Making changes to the content (words, logos, videos, testimonials) on your website might also mean changing the layout on some of your pages. All websites are designed to draw your eye to the things that you want your readers to click on. If you move things on your website, make sure that the final look of the pages are as sleek as they were before you changed things, otherwise you might cause user experience issues that can impact your leads negatively.
Broken Link Checks
Broken links on websites is a very common issue. It’s easy to miss but it’s something that you must update for your users and for the search engines. Some websites will have a lot of links on their pages, so it isn’t really feasible to manually go through and check each and every one, unless you have the patience (if so, what is your secret?). There are tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs which will do thorough checks for you and narrow down those pesky broken links.
Test Your Website Load Speed
Another of the issues that can creep up on you is the slowing of your website. A general rule for this is “faster is better” – you ideally want pages to load in under three seconds, if they’re taking longer than this you’re risking losing potential readers and customers, they’ll just go back to the search engine listing and look for the next best option.
When do you need to do updates?
It is always a good idea to do AT LEAST a monthly check on the website. If you are in the health and beauty sector this might be more of a regular thing as you adapt your product or service offerings.
How do you do the updates?
Hopefully, this blog post has given you some ideas about what you need to maintain your website. Use this guide as a checklist and go through each of the sections of your website to make sure it’s all running as it should be.
If you don’t have the time to go through the website on a regular basis we offer a website audit that gives you a full report on what needs to be updated. We suggest that doing a full check up once a year is always a good idea so that you are confident that your website is in tip top shape!
If you have any questions on the what, how or when of website maintenance for your business, please leave us a comment in the section below or let us know on our social platforms. You can find us here:
Good post on website maintenance.