Five General Maintenance Tasks Every Webmaster Needs To Do

You are no longer a web student… today, you become a webmaster! But what does that mean, exactly? What does a webmaster do? Or, more to the point, what does a good webmaster do?

Whether you’re an aspiring webmaster, an experienced one looking to improve their game, or a hiring manager that wants to know more about the job duties, we thought it’d be helpful to outline what’s expected of a webmaster. Below are 5 tasks every webmaster should do regularly for general maintenance.

1. Troubleshooting

Perhaps one of the webmaster’s most well-known general maintenance responsibilities is troubleshooting. To ensure the site is always running at peak efficiency, the webmaster must regularly test 3 aspects of a site:

• Functionality
  Usability
  Loading times

A webmaster must wear many hats to troubleshoot effectively, including an understanding of both UX design and technical requirements. They’ll also need to work closely with customer service to address large-scale customer complaints that affect the whole system.

2. Updating Content

New content is what keeps your visitors coming back — and outdated content is what chases them away. A webmaster is firstly in charge of adding and updating content regularly, to keep the site fresh and give visitors a reason to periodically check back. But they’re also in charge of removing old or broken content like dead links, broken images, or past event schedules. Webmasters of e-commerce sites also have to stay current with product lines, including prices and discontinued items.

3. Organize Hosting

Choosing a domain name, deciding which type of server is best, and finding the right hosting company are all part of the webmaster’s preliminary tasks before launch. The webmaster does a lot of the heavy lifting to get the site off the ground, but once it’s live, their job is still not finished. Webmasters continue to act as the main liaison with the hosting company.

4. Programming

Coding is the language of websites, so a good webmaster must be able to communicate with the system. Programming is an everyday occurrence, since it’s often tied to the webmaster’s other tasks. For example, updating content or a new feature may involve rewriting the code, as does fixing broken media or fine-tuning the web design, not to mention security. A good webmaster will understand the basics of HTML, Javascript, and/or CSS, or whatever web platform the company uses (such as WordPress).

5. Marketing & SEO

Last but not least, a webmaster is also responsible for driving traffic to the site, which encompasses a little know-how about digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). While the other duties fall mainly under maintenance and disaster prevention, improving traffic is one of the more ambitious aims of a good webmaster.

As opposed to traditional marketing and advertising, a webmaster focuses more on the technical methods of digital marketing, such as internal SEO and tracking for analytics. Webmasters should know how search engine algorithms work, and offer advice to the rest of the team for ways to improve the search engine ranking.

Tracking the site for analytics also falls under their charge. Webmasters set up trackers throughout the site to understand which types of pages and content are most popular, where referral traffic comes from, and general visitor behavior. While not actionable on its own, this data is invaluable for optimizing your site. Making design decisions based on the performance of your actual visitors is the clearest route to making them happy.

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