The unthinkable happens. Your website breaks, gets hacked, or sometimes completely stops functioning. You’ve carried out all the simple checks, but nothing helps.
This is where your recovery plan comes into action. These are put into place to prevent this kind of thing from becoming an issue. While things can and do go wrong regardless of how prepared you are, having a website disaster recovery plan is vital. It can make the difference between saving or losing your website.
If you don’t have a website recovery process in place, you should. Let’s take a look at the steps you need to take in order to get that started.
Backups
Just like writers keep copies of their manuscripts in case they spill coffee on the working one, you should keep a backup of your website. This is not a step you can skip or leave to chance. If your current website is lost and you have no backup, you could be looking at having to rebuild it entirely, which is a loss of time and money. Make sure you store secure backups of your website externally to your hosting platform. Don’t just stop at one; ideally, you should have 2-3 backups of your website stored in different locations for redundancy purposes.
Maintenance
If you maintain your website regularly, you have a much higher chance of spotting and fixing something before it becomes a bigger problem. Ensure that someone is responsible for maintaining and performing security updates to the website. These should be carried out on a weekly basis. Before any updates are performed, don’t forget to take a backup of your website, and then review the website after doing the routine maintenance to ensure everything is functioning as it should.
Content Updates
Updating the content on your website will typically happen on a semi-frequent basis, although this depends on the type of website that you have, and your business goals. Have a plan in place for any content updates to be performed after a backup. Ideally, you’ll have a second pair of eyes to confirm the content update is visible correctly on the front-end. This can help to stop any embarrassing typos.
Uptime Monitoring
Unless you have nothing else to do, you can’t sit and watch over your website 24/7. However, you can set up monitoring for your website so that you can check to ensure that it’s online and working correctly. Services such as Uptime Robot (link: https://uptimerobot.com), will let you set up a free monitor that checks your website every 5 minutes. If it detects downtime, it will send you an email which means you can review as required.
Passwords
It’s important to conduct a regular password audit every 2-3 months. Ensure that you only use strong passwords for your website and store these using a secure password manager. You should also take care to review who has access to your website and whether that access is needed on a continued basis.
Contact Details
Make a note of the contact details for any companies involved in hosting or managing your website. For example, you’ll want to note your hosting, company, domain provider and email provider as a minimum. Having these details handy helps you to respond to a disaster more effectively.
Of course, if you’re a solo business owner or you have a small team this can represent a significant time and skill investment. It’s not feasible for every business to have a dedicated team member who will look after their website.
This is why we offer website maintenance plans at Wild Spirit Development
Our Website Maintenance Plans are designed to help businesses of all sizes to manage, update and proactively monitor their websites. We don’t just do updates, or change text – we like to think of this as a long-term partnership where you can focus on your business, and we can focus on your website and ensure it’s reflecting your business accurately online.
As part of the service, we take secure automatic backups of your website, perform regular maintenance and software updates and for some plans, we even include support time where we’ll help with any updates or questions you have.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can click to view our Website Maintenance page.
