website management services

Website management is a necessary strategy in improving your sites search engine rankings performance, as SEO and website management go hand in hand.

For visitors and search engines alike, the management tasks below are focused on improving the sites performance across several metrics, such as speed, accessibility and standards compliance. Since websites and the various metrics change frequently, it is recommended that sites be revised and updated monthly.

Recommended monthly maintenance tasks:

improving standards compliance

Refers to the adherence to coding practices in relation to the use of HTML, with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the layout, colors, and fonts of a web page. Following the WC3 (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards helps ensure that site visitors — regardless of their browser, device, or operating system — can view the content of a web page. Standards compliant websites are more likely to load faster in a browser and tend to have better search engine rankings than their non-standards compliant counterparts.

improving accessibility

Google strongly recommends the site should be accessible for visitors with visual and motor function impairments. By following these recommendations, the site becomes better for everyone.

WAVE is a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content.

checking structural integrity

Things change. As sites get older, the likelihood of things breaking, becoming redundant or extraneous increases. Links to external sources, and even internal sources, become outdated and possibly no longer work, or require confusing redirects. Design standards and practices change constantly.

• Find and fix broken links
• Find, fix or remove orphaned files
• Ensure all images contain ALT tags and that the tags convey meaning to site visitors
• Ensure all relevant <meta> tags are in the page head code and are used properly, convey meaning:
  • charset
  • viewport
  • canonical link
  • description
  • author
  • robots
• Ensure headings structure is valid (<H1> followed by <H2>, followed by <H3>, etc.)
• Ensure XML sitemap of pages is updated
• Ensure XML sitemap of images is updated
• Ensure the titles, page headings, and topics for EACH PAGE are unique. There should be no duplication to create confusion

improving page speed

The speed at which a page downloads is the single most important factor in determining visitor satisfaction with a website. A few short years ago a site had 5-7 seconds to engage a visitor before the site was perceived as slow. Today, studies have shown you have about 2 seconds to download a page before the visitor gets frustrated and leaves.

The goal is to serve pages, images, CSS, Javascript, et al. in files that are as small as possible, and to serve those sources in the most efficient manner to provide the site visitor with the best possible experience.

• Compress resources on the server to take up less space and therefore less bandwidth in transmission
• Minify resources on the web page to shrink file size
• Optimize images to shrink the file size
• Rearranging the order in which these sources download
• Eliminate render-blocking elements from the download
• Utilize browser caching

Working together, we can customize your website management to best meet your needs and budget. Please contact us for more information.