You've done it! You have a published website. It's a great feeling to have a live website up and running after all the work to pull it together.

Your work is done now, right? Well, some of it is, but not all. In addition to adding new content to your site periodically and updating existing content, you'll also need to maintain your website. Just like a physical office, your organization's virtual home also needs regular maintenance. Some of the things you'll need to do on an ongoing basis include:

• Checking hyperlinks. As you know, hyperlinks can stop working. Webpages (and sometimes a whole website) can disappear overnight and documents you've linked to can be deleted. We recommend checking all the hyperlinks on your website (to both internal and external pages) at least every six months. If you have a large website or a lot of hyperlinks, you may want to develop a rotating schedule where you check a page every month to make the task more manageable. You would be surprised how often links expire, and if you have too many expired links on your site, your site will not be ranked highly by search engines. You can also use a link checker tool to check your hyperlinks. While the link checker tools we've found are paid tools, many allow you to check a certain number of links for free. One such tool is Dr. Link Check. 

• Adding content. When someone visits your website and sees that the most recent event or blog post was posted 5 years ago, it may make them wonder: Is this organization still active? To prevent these kinds of questions, which is important to do if you want to attract donations, you'll want to add new content on a regular basis. You don't need to add new content every day or even every month, but you do want to make sure that at least every few months you've done something that will indicate to visitors that your organization is still around, still doing work, and still hosting events and recruiting volunteers. The advice also holds for social media accounts. If you've linked social media accounts to your website, make sure that they look active by posting to them on a fairly regular basis.

• Updates. Updating existing content includes looking over the basic information on your website, such as your office address, phone number, email address, and any staff names you've posted to make sure the information is still correct. Nonprofit organizations can experience a lot of staff turnover, so if you post the names of staff on your website, you'll want to check this section frequently (possibly as frequently as once a month) to make sure it remains current. Another area requiring regular updates is your event list if you decide to post one. Not only do you want to post new events but also you may want to delete old events from your site, especially if you don't hold events often. If you only hold events every few years and the last event was 3 years ago, it may look to visitors like your website is not current or that your organization is not very active (or both).

• Revisions: We've said it before, but we'll say it again—every time you look at your site, you'll probably see something that could be better. Better said (for text), better captured (images), better formatted (all content). Once you post something to your website, you can (and should) continue to edit it and improve it as feedback comes in about how well serves its intended audience and purpose.

Create a Schedule & Set Reminders

To keep track of all these tasks and when to do them, you'll want a system. Options include using your current calendar system, whether that is paper-based or online, or using the scheduling and reminder features built into apps we've mentioned in this course such as Evernote, Nimbus Note, Trello, and Notion. You could also use a to-do list tool like ToDoist or Microsoft's To Do to keep track of tasks and set reminders.

Depending on the tool you choose, you can set recurring reminders and also link the reminder to a standard checklist of things to check and update.