Jasmine Web Starter

Its easy to treat your website like the employee that just gets on with their tasks each day without any fuss, solving any problems they come across then moving on to the next task. But as lots of businesses find out way too late they really should have look after that employee more.

Well a website is a lot like that too, great when everything is working ok, but the moment it has problems it unwinds very fast causing much larger issues.

In previous Sprouts of Wisdom tips we have written about planning for unplanned work, i.e. thinking about how you might have a plan b if a service is no longer available from a certain date, or the price rises above what you are willing to pay for that service. Also about setting out plans for keeping the website in good health and updated, plus a Business owners website Checklist, and we had a lot of great feedback and comments about these tips.

So firstly lets address some of the feedback issues in the Business owners website Checklist.

SSL Certificate

Apparently we didn't cover SSL renewal. We didn't originally cover this because we assumed that most people would be using a free SSL Certificate as part of their hosting package, which would have auto renewal configured. Obviously this outlook was a little limited on our part as a number of hosting companies still don't support/offer free SSL Certificates. So what does that mean then?

This means that each year you are going to have to pay to renew the SSL Certificate(s), the vendor will send you reminder emails but its a good idea to keep the date in mind, and renew a few weeks before this date. Once you have paid for the renewal you would need to follow the steps to make sure its available to use within the hosting account.

Updating your Website

Another question that we had is "How often should you really update your website"? Well there is no right or wrong answer here. It really comes down to what's new that you can put into your shop window to the world. How often does your business have a new service, product, case study, images or news item? A lot depends on the type of website you have, but a good rule of thumb to keeping your website fresh is at least once a month to publish an update to content but on a busy site more often might work better.

A website is a very hostile environment

More and more scams are crawling the web looking for all sort of weakness and problems, so its more important today than ever to make sure everything is updated to the latest releases. For example maybe you are using WordPress then you would want to make sure that:

WordPress is updated

Theme and child themes are updated, or outdated ones removed

Any Addins are Updated

Then you'll want to make sure your hosting is configured to be using a current PHP version like 8.1 to 8.3 not that 8.4 isn't currently supported by WordPress. PHP is also used by Addins so you will need to check which version they will work with before changing any settings.

The good news is moving to a newer PHP will have performance impact on your website and everyone likes faster websites.

Another thing to check on your website is that you only have current files and folders, anything that's old or not used should be backed up and removed.

Scammers seem to like searching (scanning) for folders called:

• backup
• new
• temp
• old
• wp
• upload
• files

Their aim is to look for passwords or connection strings that can then be used to exploit your website.

Always make sure that any files that are placed in public_html folders are public by nature and not business confidential. Backups should always be stored outside of the public_html folder. This means the files outside of public_html folder will not be available to search engines or anyone using your domain name.

The public_html directory is a folder used in web hosting that serves as the root directory for your website's files.

Whilst we're talking about backups, did you test your restore features this year? If not add it to the list of jobs for January, you never know when these steps might save you. Practicing steps when not stressed can be such a safety net.

Contact Forms

Another issue that came to light from the feedback is contact forms, and from your messages it would seem that this is an area that can get overlooked. As not all companies have plans to answer or test there contact forms, only to find out there is an email account full of messages, or that for some reason the form stopped working months ago and/or is posting to nowhere. This is often the perfect example of thinking someone else has it under control and assigned as a task, but its always a good idea to check.

We have also been asked "how quickly should I reply to contact messages"? A lot depends on your company setup but we have always tried to reply by the next working day or same working day if possible.

Last but not least

I would finally like to remind anyone still reading this far the importance of optimizing images before they are served to your users browser

Also to make sure you check contrast between colour and background even more if the text is above an image. Text works much better if all users can read it, and at the end of the day everyone wants more customers.

These two issues are still the number one cause of slow or poor usability across websites today. We have tips on Images and checking Contrast of colours.

Think we missed something?

If you have any questions or think we should have highlighted another area of running a website? let us know using the Contact form. We are always happy to update the tips to make them more useful to all.