What Is Website Maintenance and Why Do I Need It for My Drupal Site?
Congratulations on launching your new Drupal website. You can now rest assured that you never have to think about it again. It will automatically generate revenue and keep itself running for decades to come. Pat yourself on the back and have a drink. Your website is complete.
Well... this might not be entirely true.
In reality your website is never really finished. Just like with a car or home, things degrade over time. Your website is no different and you need to have a website maintenance plan.
What is website maintenance?
It is the process of keeping your website up to date and running smoothly. It involves applying security patches, monitoring web server performance, and maintaining your code base. This is on top of maintaining your content, products and/or users. You gotta do that, too. Major reasons to have a maintenance plan include security, performance, backups, and other considerations.
Security
Hackers are always looking for ways to compromise websites through new techniques or insecure code. It’s critical your website remains as secure as possible. This often involves applying security patches or software upgrades both at the code and server levels. One advantage to open source software like Drupal, is the community of developers finding security holes and contributing patches.
This is also a double edged sword. Once hackers identify a security hole, they can exploit it by targeting unmaintained sites. You are running a huge risk if you’re running a Drupal site and not keeping up with Drupal core and module security upgrades.
Performance
Performance affects the amount of time it takes for your website to load for a user on their device. This includes time to complete transactions like adding a product to a cart or submitting a form. Good website performance is good usability. Users will abandon a poorly performing website never to return. It’s also good for search engine optimization (SEO).
We include performance testing and tweaking as part of the launch process. Yet, performance can degrade over time as code, content, or the server environment changes. Perhaps your site’s traffic has increased and now requires more resources to meet user needs. Wouldn’t that be great? It is great if you’re monitoring your traffic, server performance, and page load times so you can ramp up to meet the demand.
Backups
Another component of a good website maintenance strategy is a solid backup and restore plan. Most web hosts keep some level of back ups and will either restore your site as part of your hosting package or for a fee.
While this provides a safety net, they usually only keep a short window of backups. You may need to restore your site to an earlier point than your host has kept. Or you may need to restore to a point since your host’s last backup. A defined backup strategy allows you to quickly bring your site back online whatever the case may be.
Other considerations
Broken Links
Each website page links to internal pages and external websites. These links can change over time as content expires and changes or as sites get redesigned. Keeping an eye on broken links and updating or adding redirects when urls change should be part of your maintenance plan. Broken links are detrimental to your SEO.
Web forms
It’s a good practice to test and confirm that each of your web forms are working as expected, this may include contact us, event registration, and newsletter signup forms. Hopefully you’re seeing regular submissions, but it’s possible another update affected these forms. We like to confirm everything is still working after applying other updates to a site.
Development and staging environments
When implementing development updates, you should avoid deploying new code and patches to your live website. It’s important to have a separate deveopment environment for developing and testing new features and security updates. You use a staging environment to review and confirm these updates before releasing them on your live website.
The value of maintenance
The cost of website maintenance outweighs the cost of fixing problems caused by a lack of maintenance. A website maintenance plan is an added level of insurance against security and server-related issues that can cause grief and lost revenue. At the end of the day, a well-maintained site is another component of a great user experience.
Need help with Drupal website maintenance? Get in touch.
