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The holidays are upon us and, between all the snacks, it’s a good time to perform a few quick maintenance tasks on your website to prepare yourself for the new year.
Update The Year In Your Website’s Footer
If you haven’t got this automated, pretty soon you’ll want to update the year in your website’s footer or copyright message to the new year of 2019.
Of course, automating the process is always the better option, to ensure it’s one less thing on your plate! There are a variety of ways to do this, however, we tend to opt for a simple script code. Keep in mind however that depending on your theme, you may not be able to use this code without some extra playing around, but it’s worth a try first:
<script>document.write(new Date().getFullYear());</script>
The code above only performs one simple task, in that it will display the current year. You can then add the remainder of your copyright notice right after it.
Clean Up Your DNS Records
DNS records can get both lengthy and even a bit messy over time, particularly when hosting environment updates automatically generate new records now and then.
It’s always a good idea to keep on top of your website’s DNS records, ensuring that you are familiar with what each record is responsible for.
It’s a good idea to perform an annual task where you go through and check everything is still in order, as well as clear out any older, no longer in use records. Quite often, third-party services will ask you to add records whether it be for verification purposes or functionality. If you no longer use those services, then it’s time for their associated DNS records to go too.
Check For Broken Links
If you don’t have a plugin installed for regularly scanning your website for broken links, you’ll want to be sure to manually perform this task every so often. An understandable reason for not having a broken link checker plugin installed is that it can have an impact on site speed. However, in saying this, the speed impact is often negligible, especially for small business websites, in which case it would be worth having a plugin to do the job for you automatically over any minimal loss of performance.
However, if you’re super keen on performance and prefer to do this check manually, it’s quite easy to do by either:
- Temporarily installing the plugin linked above and running it once. You can then rectify any broken link issues before uninstalling the plugin again.
- Using a website such as Free Broken Link Check or Dead Link Checker.
This is an important task to do as having a lot of dead links on your website can have a negligible impact on your Google rankings.
Clear Out Spam Accounts
If your website allows visitors to register for an account, there’s a chance you may have a few spam users who have signed up over the year.
They can usually be detected by having unusual email addresses. They are also likely to have never interacted with your store in any meaningful way such as submitting valuable content or buying a product or service.
It can’t hurt to clear out these accounts if you suspect they may not be genuine. Furthermore, you can protect your registration form from future spam account signups by installing a plugin such as Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) by BestWebSoft.
That’s it from us for this week. As always, if you have any questions about this post or our shared hosting, VPS, reseller or dedicated server plans, simply call us on 1300 MY HOST (694 678) during business hours, or submit a ticket through our Support Portal and one of the crew will be in touch!
