Creating a small business website is easier with the available tools and techniques. But there’s more to a website than just designing and publishing.
It takes time for a website to become successful and attract the right amount of audience to it. Also, a small website can only run successfully if it is properly maintained and optimized from time to time.
In this article, we will discuss some simple but essential small business website optimization and maintenance steps that can ensure the smooth and successful online presence.
- Know the audience of your website
- Check mobile-friendliness on your small business website
- Optimize your website’s DataBase
- Remove unnecessary plugins/Data
- Image optimization for your website optimization
- Google page speed
- Regular Themes and Plugins Updates and Backups
- Promoting and Marketing
- Set Up Web Analytics and monitor your search engine ranks
- Set Up Google Search Console to optimize visibility of your website
- Other Routine tasks
Know your audience to serve them well
You must know the audience, benefactors of your website properly to be able to serve them with the kind of information they need.
So before you even start advertising or updating your website with listings, you must be well aware of your target audience.
Let’s say, your small website is an educational website, so your target audience would be students. While for a general purpose website, the target audience can include people of different age group and different fields.
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Knowing your audience and their requirements are important so that you can plan your promotional tactics based on that.
Also, keep a track of the user reviews and feedback for your website to judge the performance of your website. Knowing the interest and reviews of your users can also help you plan future integrations and enhancements in your website.
Even when your website is online and running successfully, you must keep in touch with your users. You could just find out something that causes inconvenience to your users.
Check mobile-friendliness of your WordPress small business website
First of all, always remember to choose a mobile-friendly WordPress business theme, or a responsive platform to create your online presence in form of a website.
Now, even though you choose a mobile-friendly website template, you must check all of the main pages of your website for mobile friendliness. Check that all the important information appears clearly on your site, check the menus and the important links.
Responsiveness of your business website directly affects its usability. Therefore, ensuring that your website renders well in all devices is a must. If you find problems in the mobile view of your website, then you should immediately take steps to correct it.
Optimize the database of your WordPress website
WordPress is an awesome CMS that takes control of your database management. But still, database optimization is important.
However, it can be a once in a new moon task. Once optimized, you can go on for a year or two without repeating the process. But when your business website has been around for a while, you must start optimizing your database.
If it’s a WordPress based small biz website than you can use the plugins like Simple optimizer or RGV optimize. These WordPress add-ons will help to remove the unnecessary junk from the website such as post revisions, spam comments etc.
It will make website’s database more efficient and perform better.
Remove unnecessary plugins/data from your website
With routine maintenance tasks in your website, you may end up stacking a few more plugins and add-ons than required.
Generally, the add-ons and plugins in software systems are designed to seamlessly integrate and work with your website. However, there are exceptions, plus they do reserve some space.
Therefore, it is always recommended to keep only required plugins active and installed for your small business website. You can consider it as regular cleanup routine. So over time, you must revisit the plugins and add-ons management section of your software and check for unused and unnecessary plugins.
Also, it’s always good to get rid of unnecessary pages or listings that no longer add value to your website. So after a few days, you can log in to your dashboard and find out all the expired drafts and delete them.
You can even look for the pages or any other kind of content that you no longer use on your website.
Delete spam comments and deprecated content
WordPress 2.6 and all above version has new feature it creates the revision of your post and pages. So whenever you make any changes to your post or update it. It will create a backup of the older version of that page/post. Rapid changes on your site will increase the size of your database.
Consequently, your database burden will increase with the unnecessary revision of the same post. You can Delete, Disable and Restrict the post revision. in many cases, the post revisions don’t require.
Just like page and post revisions, the spam comments can take up a huge amount of database space. We can delete it easily from the WordPress admin area. If your small business website gets a lot of spam comments you must delete it at regular intervals of time. You can do this from wp-admin >> Comments >> Spam >> Empty spam button.
Image Optimization for small business websites
A small business website may, or may not have so many images. But regardless of the number of images you are using on your website, having them optimized is the best idea.
Image optimization is a very crucial task for any site. Which should be performed prior to uploading an image to your website.
Make sure you are uploading the perfect sized image as per the predefined theme structure with the specific image formats like png, jpg, etc. Also, Image optimization has an important role in site SEO if your image is properly optimized and it has proper title and alt name as per the post.
There are more chances to rank higher in image search. Properly optimized images on the website help to improve the user experience, Usability and create good chance to gain the best position in image search results.
Check Google page speed for the pages of your business site
For more detail on page speed optimization go thoroughly from Google Page Speed It is a very good site analysis tool which will help you on exactly how you can improve your small business website’s speed.
Add your website’s link to this tool and click analyze to generate the analysis report. It will provide the recommendations for possible optimization to improve the site speed it also displays the well-optimized parts of your site.
Hence it helps to identify the flaws on site where optimization is necessary to improve the page speed. You can either perform these DIY speed optimization routines on your own.
Regular Themes and Plugins Updates and Backups
It is always recommended keeping WordPress based small business website updated to the latest version of themes and plugin available. It often increases the security by strengthening against attacks and patching vulnerabilities. To overcome the risk of the website being compromised or hacked.
When WordPress expert suggests anything about WordPress security, the first suggestion of them is to install the update because the Malicious parties and Hackers start to study the release notes and then they start to learn of a possible vulnerability and start exploiting them after they get the way. That is the reason you should update your site immediately after you get the notification of updated themes and plugins available.
I should mention that all WordPress updates don’t include the security patches. Hence it’s not always important to update your themes and plugins on urgent basis. Prior to updating your site, you may refer the changelog of the particular theme/plugins. Based on change log you may schedule your site updates.
Prior to updating themes and plugin take a backup of your website and database on your hard drive. It will help you in case you need to rollback to the previous version for any possible reasons.
Promoting and Marketing your small business website
The best way to gain popularity in the digital world is to make your impression with branding your products it creates the impact on users mind and increases the value. Because of branding impression the users consider it more superior than other. another means to grow popularity is through promoting your business website with various means of advertising platform available in today’s world.
Digital Marketing for your small business website
With the knowledge and understanding of various online marketing platform, tools, and processes we can increase the visibility, Brand value, Engagement, and ideas. As the world is going digital the success of your site is depends on the marketing and imparting that your marketing through the digital too.
Promoting your website through social media marketing is the best way to advertise your site. Through the social media, we can promote the site effectively and more efficiently.
Integrate SSL on your site when security is a concern
Integrating SSL certificate it the best way to assure security, It provides end to end data protection. it is important for the sites where the online transaction is performed.
Small business website optimization for SEO
SEO is directly responsible for the visibility of your small biz website. SEO is actually, not a process that you perform on your website is after it is created.
To start with, you must choose an SEO friendly WordPress business theme. Next, while you create your pages, you must follow simple SEO rules to ensure that the page is noticed by the search engine and listed for the relevant keyword.
However, at a later stage, you can perform SEO audits to find out the status of your website and take necessary actions to optimize it. It includes various processes like rank checking, competitive analysis, keyword research etc.
Moreover, you can use various SEO plugins for your platform. For WordPress, there are several plugins that can let you track and manage the SEO friendliness of your page.
Set Up Web Analytics and monitor your search engine ranks
Analytics on your website is important because you cannot always rely on guesswork. Especially when it comes to business websites & conversions, you might want to track the web statistics to have useful insights about your website
Such insights matter because they help you decide the future strategies for your website. You can find out where your major traffic is coming from.
You can track the best-performing pages and update its content to the best use. Also, you can track the poor performing pages and optimize their content.
You can even use the demographics results to find out about the region that contributes most to your traffic and the age group of the people.
Ultimately, the Google analytics helps you in many ways to measure the performance of your website and take necessary steps.
Set Up Google Search Console to optimize visibility of your website
Google’s webmaster tools are specialized tools to help you with visibility of your small business website. One needs to put the best efforts toward organic traffic generation. This is where you can use the Google Search Console to optimize your website for Google.
Previously known as Google Webmaster’s tool, it lets you manage your sitemap, robots.txt, and provides you with some valuable reports regarding the performance of your website.
You can either spend a few hours researching about Google Search Console and use it for your website or hire an SEO expert to boost the visibility of your website.
It’s time for your small business website optimization
Whatever your business niche maybe, the maintenance steps stay the same.
Proper promotions and advertisements can help you attract visitors to your website. But only maintenance and promotions can make them stay on your website.
You might spend a fortune on promotions and get the desired number of visitors on your small business website, but the only thing that can ensure that your casual visitors become regular visitors is the properly managed content.
If you have any thoughts about website maintenance and optimization, feel free to express yourself through the comments.
Want to start a new Small Business Website on your own
All the points mentioned here will help you create a website that leaves lasting impression. All you need to get started now is a good and flexible theme.
We have a theme store where you can find highly customizable and feature packed WordPress Themes to create professional looking websites on your own.
To create your own small business website, we recommend using the Ombrello multipurpose theme that can be used to create almost any kind of business website. Be it a creative studio, a photographer, a trader’s website, a service based website, etc.
Know more about The Ombrello WordPress Theme and start creating your own website today.