Are you prepared if the unthinkable happens to your small business website? And by unthinkable, I mean your website breaks, gets hacked or stops functioning. If any of that happens, do you have a Website Disaster Recovery Plan so you know what to do and where to start? Let’s take a look at our top 6 website support tips, which can be the difference between saving or losing your website and minimising your website’s downtime.

1. Website backups

This is a crucial step. Just as writers keep a copy of their manuscripts in case their computer dies, small business owners should keep a backup of their websites.

Thinking about what would happen if your website was lost and you didn’t have a backup makes me shiver. It would mean starting from scratch with a rebuild, which is costly and time-consuming. Both are lessons that can be avoided with a backup.

It’s always best practice to ensure you store secure backups of your website externally to your hosting platform. Don’t just stop at one. Ideally, 2-3 backups of your website should be stored in different locations to cover all possible scenarios.

2. Website maintenance and support

It’s essential to regularly maintain your website to catch and fix issues before they escalate.

If you don’t have time to maintain your website yourself, consider engaging a professional website maintenance service so your website’s security is maintained regularly. This is especially true if you’re on WordPress, as you also have:

• Plugins
• Theme
• WordPress core files 

And if you’re running the updates yourself, always remember to back up your website before making any updates.

3. Content updates

Updating the content on your website should occur as frequently as you can manage without compromising the quality of your content. Quality over quantity every time.

I’m speaking from experience when I say this next tip: Write your content in a Word doc or Google Doc rather than making the changes (if they’re big ones) straight on the website. When I had my ecom personalised gift store, I was on a roll a few times and wrote the product descriptions straight into the website platform. Before I hit save, the internet dropped out, and I lost all I had done.

Also, ensure you have a backup before you make any big content/design updates or changes. You never know when something might glitch and go down. And don’t forget to take another backup after you’ve made your updates, too. You don’t want to lose any of those critical changes.

Remember to run a spell check or use Grammarly to spot spelling or grammar mistakes.

4. Uptime Monitoring

Monitoring a website constantly 24/7 isn’t feasible unless you have nothing else to do. But it’s still important to ensure your website is always up and functioning properly.

A great and easy solution is to set up uptime monitoring for your website so that you can check to ensure that it’s online and working correctly. Services such as Uptime Robot 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 the issue and take necessary action to ensure your website is back online as quickly as possible.

5. Passwords

Know your passwords and get into the habit of reviewing them every 2-3 months. Ensure you only use strong passwords for your website and store these using a secure password manager.

You should also review who has access to your website and whether that access is needed on a regular basis. It’s also good practice to have more than one administrator on your website and social media accounts.

6. Contact Details

Keep a record of your website’s host and domain name and their contact details. This is extremely important, and I can’t stress knowing these details enough. You might be surprised how many small business owners I speak with that have no idea or aren’t sure who their website host is and where their domain name is registered.

Take it a step further and note when they both fall due—just in case your reminders don’t come through or your payment details have changed, and you forget to update them.

Having all these handy helps you respond to a disaster more efficiently if or when it happens.

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