Tools and tips for easy website management

Websites end up feeling outdated and kind of rusty around the edges when they’ve been left to their own devices for a little too long. Neglect a website’s basic maintenance needs, and your SEO rankings, website traffic, and any kind of quality user experience will slowly fade away. Not to mention the backend will start creaking under the pressure if you fall behind on updates — a fast-track to your website crashing at the most, let us repeat, the most inconvenient time.

Website management will always be necessary — it’s what keeps your brand moving in this human-digital reality we're all now driving our businesses forward in. Get to know the essential tools, and maintaining your website and maximising your marketing efforts gets a whole lot easier.

This is not an owner’s manual, but more of a quick start guide to website management. We’ll introduce you to the tools we use day-in, day-out, plus some tips for using them effectively, to get you up to speed and get that website of yours travelling in the right direction.

Website management tools, the essentials

1. Content management system (CMS)

   The day-to-day management of a website would be all but impossible without an effective content management system. Beautifully-conceptual branding complete with sensory motion design touches will only take you so far—a website is only as good as the content published on it.

   The purpose of a CMS is straightforward; it supports content creation and updates, and gives website, content or marketing managers an accessible means of streamlining and managing the content published on your site without the assistance of a web developer. From keeping key user landing page content up-to-date to publishing new pages to promote products, services or ideas — a CMS should support your marketing and business objectives, not hinder them.

   Craft CMS is proving to be the CMS of choice for businesses shaping their digital strategies to be futureproof. It’s a scalable CMS that can support the local to the multi-national, and every brand in between. Favoured for its user-friendly interfaces and unlimited plug-in integrations, the flexibility and adaptability it offers for creating content your way makes other CMS feel all a bit restrictive. For eCommerce, Shopify is built for effortless sales and product management, with intuitive tools to create highly flexible and targeted stores to promote and sell your products services to your target audience.

    

2. PageSpeed Insights

   Your website is in the business of attention. It needs to take every opportunity to connect with users, and to do this it must load your content quickly and effectively to engage them as soon as they land on any webpage on your site. The slow rendering of page elements can distort and disrupt the intended user experience, impacting a user’s perception of your brand and their behaviour on your site, and have negative effects on your search rankings as a result.

   Google’s free tool - PageSpeed Insights - allows you to quickly evaluate the loading time of your website, its performance and behaviour on desktop or mobile devices. Enter your URL, and it will generate a near immediate assessment; providing overall scores for the performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, and a clear breakdown and explanation of the performance issues it finds on your site. By identifying issues, you can quickly take actions that will optimise and improve your site's load times and responsiveness. In the attention economy, speed matters, and PageSpeed Insights will show exactly where you’re losing potential customers to poor performance.

    

3. Analytics

   Understanding the behaviour of users visiting your site is crucial to an effective marketing strategy. An analytics tool, such as Google Analytics or Hotjar, allows you to measure website performance by tracking user behaviour; giving you visibility of where your users are coming from (traffic sources) to what they’re doing once they arrive on your site (user behaviour), and if their activity is meeting your objectives. In simpler terms, you can assess the web pages they are or are not reading, determine which buttons they are, or are not, clicking. Gain clarity from data about all the traffic your website experiences, and you can focus your website management tasks; updating content, optimising user journeys and testing out new strategies to support your goals.

   It’s worth mentioning that simply adding tracking to your website isn’t going to cut it — you need to analyse the data regularly to determine where you can make improvements. If Google Analytics is proving too complex, a tool like Fathom Analytics simplifies data for clear, insightful metrics that make analysing your websites easier and more accessible.

    

4. SEO tools

   Can the people looking for the type of products, services or ideas your business sells find you online? Beyond assessing all your website traffic with an Analytics tool - an SEO tool is a marketing must-have to maximise visibility. According to Serpwatch - online searches generate a third of all global web traffic, with organic search generating 53.3% of all website traffic across industries.

   Tools like ahrefs allow you to get stuck into the specifics of your SEO performance from both an on-page (think content) and technical (think back-end website build) perspective. It analyses your website traffic, gives you the ability to monitor your rankings and search terms or ‘keywords’ in comparison to your competitors, and supports technical auditing. If that’s a stretch for your budget, you can trust Google Search Console with all your SEO requirements. A free tool, it offers real-time data to identify potential to improve your rankings, review performance and diagnose technical issues — all you need to dial-up your search marketing.

Quick tips for easy website management

Select the right tools. While some tools are versatile and free-to-use, others might need more evaluation on your part to determine whether they are cost-effective, complex, simple or specific enough for your particular website. How they will integrate and scale with your business? Is there adequate guidance to support you or your team in learning how to use them effectively? 

Be consistent. Websites get challenging when they are left to their own devices for long periods; they fall behind on crucial updates, lose relevance to algorithms and the content becomes dated. Reporting on and auditing the performance of your website should be a monthly task, minimum.

Keep track of publishing. Have systems in place to approve, publish and audit content accordingly. Whether you are the sole content publisher or there are multiple website managers publishing and editing content daily, webpages that go unaccounted for can cause headaches down the line.

Set alerts! With the last two tips in mind, do yourself a favour and set up alerts and reminders to relieve some of the mental load — Slack or email work well. The goal is to manage your website proactively and consistently, and so reduce the time you spend solving larger issues that could have been caught sooner.  

In short…

As a central digital asset to your business, you will reap the rewards of a website that is raring and ready-to-go for every website user it greets. Effective website management can amplify your marketing and business activity in ways that are both cost-effective and impactful, it’s just about getting to know the right tools for the job in question.

…can we help you?

If you need some support in auditing your website’s performance, or need expert assistance in managing and optimising your website, get in touch with the Mud team today. We can provide an assessment of your website in its current state, and have a range of support packages should your business require a more robust action plan to get your site into shape, even if we didn’t build it. If you need a more resilient and reliable service when it comes to maintenance, reach out to us and we’ll work with you to find out how we can better manage your site moving forward.