Your membership platform is a living, breathing ecosystem. Just like a physical store needs maintenance; so does your digital ecosystem. Except, proper maintenance of your online presence gives it the ability to add value and reach more members. We’d like to see a physical location do that!
Here are the 7 key maintenance activities you should strive to apply as the foundation of any strong digital membership experience.
1. Reporting and monitoring
Website maintenance is all about tracking, testing, and tracing. Wait, that’s the wrong slogan. I mean tracking, testing, and implementing.
Beginning with tracking. Well-executed dashboards are central to informing your website maintenance; a new change causing a 1-second delay in page load speed can impact conversion rates by 7%! Use centralised dashboards and email alerts to track the following metrics to inform your strategy:
- Sessions and conversions by source/medium.
- Page Speed.
- Top Landing Pages.
- Top Exit Pages.
- Pages with highest Bounce rates.
- Events and conversion tracking.
- Keyword position tracking and impression share.
- Website uptime.
- Error reports from your hosting provider and search console.
Further segment these KPIs by whether the user is a logged-in member or an unknown user. You don’t need to use an expensive tool for this. Utilise Google Data Studio or the integrated reporting tool from your analytics and hosting software for dashboards.
2. Content protection and backups
From malicious bots and technical errors to human mishaps, your membership content isn’t invincible. Implement granular permissions for core website content and member-managed content to de-risk human error, and conduct regular backups – especially when there is active development taking place.
3. Security & vulnerability scanning
Whether you’re utilising Drupal, Umbraco, WordPress or something else – when you’re holding identifiable data on your members, security is key. Your technical team should always be monitoring for security updates, making you aware of the implications, and taking action. If you’re ever left in the dark about ‘the why’ of a security update, by its very nature, you may be at risk. When it comes to security, communication is critical. Scan, evaluate, and take action. Quickly.
4. Legal compliance
The UK Government, EU, and regulatory bodies around the world are raising the bar in terms of data management, accessibility and usability, and industry-specific guidelines. Your support team should be up to date on all of the latest online legislation relevant to your membership body and ensuring your website is meeting the legal requirements. Recent examples include the Public Sector’s accessibility legislation and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
5. Device testing
Over time, your website code can become unstable. Automated testing helps you to be aware of potential errors in integrations or the design of your website. Testing your website design and responsiveness will help you to avoid losing the 52% of users who will avoid a brand with a negative mobile experience. Test regularly throughout development, and periodically while stable to highlight potential issues with your website on your sites most popular devices and browsers. Access your device reports in Google Analytics > Audience > Browser & OS and review your usability stats such as bounce rate and time spent on the most common browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions for any anomalies.
6. Organic visibility and SEO Health
Google releases around nine updates a day. Without constant maintenance, your site’s visibility will drop. While active link building and content development are important, everyday maintenance is the core of your SEO strategy. Set up a dashboard or email alerts that inform you of any drop (or increase) in your core keywords and the traffic going to critical website pages.
Create a habit of reviewing your link profile. Disavow any malicious or spam links that could damage the authority of your pages. Also, keep an eye for both internal and external broken links and images. Not only will 74% of users exit a site if they encounter a 404 error, but they tell the search engines your site is becoming out of date.
7. Performance maintenance
Your membership body website is part of a much bigger ecosystem than you might think. From service providers to third party integrations and legacy code, your overall performance and maintenance have a lot to contend with. Plan to regularly optimise performance through the following actions:
- Streamlining server requests or increasing hosting resource
- Implementing caching and content delivery network where required
- Monitoring file sizes
- HTML, CSS and Javascript minification
- Maintaining site responsiveness
- Logfile analysis
Short term patching of one issue might lead to higher costs down the road. Or integrating a new framework that meets your immediate needs could lead to an expensive migration a few months later. Ensure you’re monitoring the success of your integrations, and leave time for big picture thinking to avoid ending up with an inefficient code base and the dreaded technical debt.
Membership body website musts
These are just seven of the ‘musts’ of a strong membership website maintenance strategy. The last ‘must’ I will leave you with is old fashioned communication. If your website support team are always too busy to talk, not interested in saving you costs long term, and struggling to understand your priorities, something is wrong.
CTI Digital are an award-winning agency specialising in web development and digital marketing. Get expert support for your Drupal, Umbraco, Kentico or WordPress website from an ISO accredited and cyber essentials certified agency, CTI Digital. Contact us for a free consultation on the health of your website.
Leave A Comment