How can I reduce costs on website maintenance?

Website maintenance covers the back-end health of your website. It ensures your website remains healthy, up-to-date, secure, and optimized over time.

Not following best practices for content population, file uploads, accessibility, or SEO can start adding up. You may start to experience longer loading times, or some elements stop working the way they were supposed to. 

There are ways that you can cut costs on your inevitable website maintenance by taking care of the small details that add up yourself!

What are the best practices for budgeting website upkeep?

Websites are not rotisseries; we cannot set them and forget them. 

I mean, you CAN ignore your website after it launches, but something will inevitably go wrong (because technology is constantly evolving), and you’ll have to sort it out eventually. Or your website might become a web-offsite.

Optimize images before uploading

Every file uploaded to your media library should be optimized beforehand. If you download an image from a stock site or your camera and take no steps to edit that file, there is a 99.9% chance that you’re adding a file that is WAY too large for your needs.

And these images add up.

Images should be optimized for web use, not print use. Adjustments to image dimensions can reduce their file size exponentially. 

Saving the image as an alternate format altogether may earn you more file size reduction without loss of quality.

You can ask your web designer or website developer what the dimensions are for the images you are wanting to update, but you can also figure this out yourself by using your browser’s Developer Tools.

While in an active browser window viewing your web page, press your keyboard’s F12 key or right-click the page and select ‘Inspect’. A new window in your browser should open and display the HTML code of your web page.

The inspection tool will allow you to highlight different elements on your page; When you hover over an image on the page a tooltip pop-up can appear that will display the width and height of your image in pixels.

This can be a helpful exercise if you’ve been uploading images that are much larger than needed.

Opening these images in a new tab will show us their original size, but not the resized dimensions needed to display on our websites. By inspecting elements on the page we get the dimensions of the container the images are sitting in, rather than their original size.

On the web, we only need images to be as large as they will display in the largest viewport. Where your viewport is the screen you’re viewing your website on: desktop, tablet, or mobile for example.

Uploading anything smaller will cause pixelation and quality disturbance of the image itself. Uploading anything greater will cause the website to use resources to resize the image to fit its container, or create multiple versions of the same image at different sizes.

🔍 Looking for more image optimization tips? Learn more about editing images for web and social media.

Proof your content

Proof-reading your content before publishing online goes a bit beyond making sure your spelling and grammar are correct. Here are the top 4 issues I come across on DIY web updates:

1. Copying and pasting existing errors from the original text
2. Copying and pasting unwanted document-formatting code into the website
3. Causing 404 errors or issues with untested links
4. Amount of characters exceed the original intent of the container element

Existing errors in original text

Whether your content was originally created in a word doc, email, or PDF, or it was pulled from the wrong version of a shared file, typical grammatical errors can occur when the process of reviewing and editing has been forgotten.

I see this happen a lot when the content wasn’t necessarily written by the publisher, and either the mistake wasn’t caught or was assumed as correct.

Appending unwanted formatting code

When you copy text from a PDF or word document that has already been styled or formatted, chances are that your copy contains a bunch of invisible formatting instructions that can be pasted into your web page without realizing it.

This happens far too often, but is the main culprit of why text looks “weird” by being a different font type, or style, than the rest of the content on the web page. It is likely inheriting some settings from your original document that it shouldn’t.

You can avoid this by pasting text without its original formatting by using [CTRL+SHIFT+V or CMD+SHIFT+V]. Then if you do want to retain some of the formatting, like a list, bolding, or heading tags you can do so within the settings of your actual website to ensure the correct styles are being applied.

Test your hyperlinks

Internal and external links can support your user experience and SEO efforts, but you need to maintain and monitor these links over time.

You may cite an awesome reference in one of your popular blog posts, but if that third-party site makes any changes to their article or URL, you may end up linking to a broken page or a site that hasn’t renewed their SSL certificate – which can reflect poorly on your website as the referrer.

Know your character-length

When clients email me after they update content and say that something doesn’t look quite right, it is almost always that the updated text is either not long enough or too long for it’s element container.

In original strategy and design phases, a lot of thought goes into the overall look of your website; The formatting of each page layout and how best to align the delivery of your content to your audience. Over time, I think a lot of website owners forget about this and operate from a mindset of “just getting new content on the site”.

Some elements on our websites are meant to be taglines, or brief captions. Sometimes they’re simple call-to-actions (CTAs) to invite the user to take a step. Or, a section may be limited to a single paragraph so it aligns with its imagery.

Original copy may have been optimized for user experience, SEO, accessibility, or marketing purposes, and its replacement could erase all that effort.

Extended text will require more time to tweak the design or layout of your page to ensure your new content flows well and integrates better with the rest of the site.

🔍 Looking for more advice on blogging?: Check out these content and copywriting tips.

Properly format your blog posts

When populating blog posts into WordPress it can nearly be a direct copy and paste IF the original content is properly formatted. Which can greatly decrease the time it will take for you or your website manager to tweak and format your post.

For example, if you’re using a word-like document to create your post you can apply proper heading hierarchy that will copy over to WordPress’ block editor. This means that if you properly attribute the right H2 and H3 headings to your titles and headlines, they will retain these attributes when copied and pasted.

Keep these additional tips in mind:

H1 Heading

You should only have one H1 per page and your post title will automatically use this heading tag.

H2 Headings

Every subsequent title/heading that starts a new idea or topic within your post should be set to an H2 tag.

H3 Headings

Then, any heading that is a “child” of the preceding H2 topic will need to be an H3 tag. When you’re ready to shift the topic of conversation, you can apply a new H2 tag and carry on.

Don’t apply additional styles to your headings

Websites already have styling applied to content elements like paragraphs and headings. This means that you don’t have to bold your titles, or change their colours, because they’re likely already applying a style once they’re populated.

💡 Heading hierarchy is an important part of website accessibility: Learn more about common accessibility mistakes.

Lists

Itemized lists, both ordered and unordered, can also be copied and pasted into the WordPress block editor and retain their list tags.

Hyperlinks

When you apply a link to text in your document this hyperlink can also be copied and pasted. At most, the step of opening external links in a new tab may be applied.

The more unnecessary styling and formatting that you apply to your source copy the more work your website manager (or you) will need to rectify before it’s ready to be scheduled or published.

Include your images as attachments

Embedding images into your document can be helpful for directing which and where you want graphics to appear within your post, but this shouldn’t be the way you deliver your image assets.

Documents can resize or be difficult to extract from, so it’s always best to link to a shared folder online, or attach them in an email (don’t embed in the email content) so that your website manager can get the appropriate file easily.

What affordable website maintenance tools are available for small businesses?

Your hosting plan may include automatic WordPress updates, but fair warning: this isn’t something you should turn on unless you also have automatic backups and restoration points available.

The hosting plans that offer automatic backups will revert your site back to a previous version if it encounters an error, but not all hosting plans are created equal.

For this reason you should be checking in on your site regularly to ensure that both the back and front-ends are working properly.

Other hosting plans will require an add-on service to allow for backups, otherwise you’ll need to make them manually (which requires a bit more technical know-how). 

So for beginners my recommendation is to ensure your hosting server does this for you and you can easily deploy a previous version of your website if something goes wrong.

How do I create a website maintenance plan that fits a tight budget?

If your website is an integral part of your business, then the health of your website matters. And like most things, you pay for what you get.

With a small budget you might be better off paying for improved hosting that ensures your website is automatically backed up daily, with restoration points that you can revert back to if any problems come up.

Then when you need to, you can budget working with a developer or in some cases, paying a fee to your host to help resolve the issue if they offer that service.

If you prefer being completely hands-off from maintaining your website a proprietary SaaS platform may be a better fit. But remember, these services also come with their own set of pros and cons.

However, working with a professional web developer or manager can add more support for your business than just the technical maintenance of your website.

“Whenever I have questions about how, and whether or not, to add or delete a feature, or if I’m uncertain about best practices or broader web strategy, it’s a huge relief to be able to ask someone with expertise, whom I trust.” – Sandra SG Wong, Author

🔍 What can a website manager do for you?: Learn why these business owners invest in website management.

How to compare pricing for website maintenance packages from different providers

The best way to compare pricing for any service is to understand what it is that you’re paying for. This might mean doing some homework!

Requesting a one-off consultation to ask questions or get direction on where you should start looking can be a great use of your budget that ends up saving you money in the long run.

It can be overwhelming trying to deduce information on a subject you’re not entirely confident in, so don’t be afraid of asking for help, even if it’s just a short conversation!

Your service provider should be able to give you an outline of what is covered, and what isn’t, along with a rate that you can keep in mind should you need any additional support that is out of scope of your original agreement.

Solutions may look like a monthly or annual plan, or a pay-as-you-go treatment.

💡 You don’t have to go it alone: Learn how to prepare for a professional website consultation.