For businesses running on Sitecore's powerful content management system, staying on top of maintenance is crucial. A well-oiled Sitecore machine enables effortless content creation, lightning deployment, and pixel-perfect digital experiences across all channels. But let things slide, and you'll quickly find yourself swimming against a rising tide of bloat, errors and inefficiencies.
From content workflows to database hygiene, there's a lot to keep tabs on. But with the right processes and tools in place, you can ensure your Sitecore site operates like a finely tuned machine for years to come. Here's a complete guide to the monthly maintenance must-dos.
Back It Up For Peace of Mind
The first order of business? Having a bulletproof backup and recovery plan. Because no matter how reliable your infrastructure, outages and disasters can strike at any time. Human error and malicious attacks only compound the risks.
At a minimum, you'll want to maintain up-to-date backups of your Sitecore databases and media library, stored in a secure offsite location. Using Azure Blob Storage is a smart and cost-effective option for housing database backups. And Azure's native backup services make scheduling and monitoring backups of your VMs effortless.
With backups squared away, you've got a safety net if the worst were to happen. But maintenance isn't just about restoring from catastrophe. It's also about keeping your live site in tip-top shape.
Monitoring for a Clean Bill of Health
Think of the various moving parts that power a Sitecore site, from front-end delivery servers to the database backend. Keeping tabs on their performance and availability should be high priority.
Start by tracking analytics on site usage and traffic. An unexpected drop can be your first sign of problems like outages and slowdowns. From there, you'll want tools to monitor site uptime and performance across both your production and test environments.
Services like UptimeRobot offer a great bang for your buck, pinging your site every few minutes and alerting you instantly if it hits any snags. Set up monitoring for your most heavily-trafficked pages too. Because a sunny-day homepage doesn't mean squat if your conversion flows are falling over.
On the infrastructure side, you'll want dashboards highlighting key VM and database metrics like CPU, memory, and disk usage. Proactively catching issues before they become bottlenecks. Azure's built-in monitoring makes this easy, with customizable alerts that can automatically ping you if resources breach defined thresholds.
Between your external uptime monitors and internal telemetry, you should gain an eagle-eye view of your Sitecore implementation's health. Watching the gauges and addressing any issues is pivotal for maintaining peak performance.
But what about when things do go awry despite your best efforts?
Sifting Through the Log Files
A Sitecore site's log files hold a wealth of diagnostic information on errors and events. Combing through them regularly is a must for identifying and triaging problems.
Set a calendar reminder to review your latest logs for any nasty errors or bloat. If certain files have grown excessively large, they could point to an underlying issue like rogue exception handling. You may even want to configure active log monitoring. That way, errors get surfaced and remediated in real-time, rather than piling up between reviews.
While you're at it, be sure to run Sitecore's built-in maintenance utilities from the Control Panel. Whether it's rebuilding the internal link databases, reindexing search, or optimizing SQL, these tools help keep your CMS humming.
Patching the Holes for Tighter Security
Security vulnerabilities are an inevitability. Unpatched systems are low-hanging fruit ripe for exploitation by bad actors.
That's why it's critical to have a rock-solid process for keeping your Sitecore installation updated with the latest security fixes and patches from the vendor. Identify and download the relevant update packages for your specific version. Then it's simply a matter of testing and deploying within your established release cadences.
For some organizations, the idea of routinely applying updates may cause hesitation. What about regression risks or unwanted downtime? By maintaining proper test environments and defining robust deployment processes upfront, you can reap the security benefits while mitigating change risks.
With everything up-to-date and secure, your site is far less susceptible to attacks or disruptions due to exploits. But there's more ground to cover in preventing problems from festering.
Cleaning Up Content and Media Clutter
For a CMS to operate efficiently, maintaining an uncluttered and organized content library is paramount. Redundant files, broken links, and outdated assets only serve to clog up your pipelines.
Start by leveraging some of Sitecore's built-in reporting tools like the Broken Links report. This will surface any instances where rich text fields or renderings are attempting to link to items that no longer exist. Housekeeping these errors immediately prevents further proliferation of bad links.
From there, employ PowerShell scripts to audit your content tree and flag additional red flags:
- Content scheduled for archival but never removed
- Unpublished or incomplete workflow items
- Expired personalizations or A/B tests still attached
- Locked items and other workflow bottlenecks
The media library deserves equal scrutiny. With content authors coming and going over time, keeping media organized can quickly become challenging. Follow established folder conventions that mirror your content hierarchies. This makes finding the right assets a breeze. And leverage compression and resizing to keep those image and video payloads lean.
By maintaining a policy of review and cleanup, you'll prevent content cruft from bogging down your authoring experiences or clogging your delivery pipes. This preventative discipline is key for longterm housekeeping.
Optimizing for Blazing-Fast Front-End Performance
Speaking of delivery, you can't forget the front-end performance piece of the maintenance puzzle. Users have virtually zero patience for laggy sites and clunky UIs. By keeping your pages trim and optimized, you'll foster better engagement while reducing infrastructure costs.
Regularly put your most critical user flows through their paces using tools like Google Lighthouse. The insights can highlight low-hanging fruit for reducing payload sizes, eliminating render-blocking bottlenecks, and smoothing animations. Compress images, defer non-critical loads, and inline critical CSS - every optimization compounds for serious performance wins.
And remember, Page Speed is a real Google ranking factor now. So every time you boost performance, you're not just delivering superior customer experiences. You're giving your SEO a shot in the arm too.
With all the technical tuning boxes checked, it's time to shift our maintenance focus to the content itself and ensuring it delivers maximum value.
Analyzing Content Health and Relevance
Publishing stale or irrelevant content is a surefire way to erode user engagement over time. That's why conducting regular content audits is so crucial.
Start by digging through your analytics and search data to uncover subject areas and topics resonating most with your audience. Then cross-reference that against your actual published inventory to identify gaps, underperformers and candidates for sunsetting. Look for declines in organic traffic or click-throughs as potential red flags that a refresh may be due.
With those findings in hand, activate your editors. Update existing content to realign with current audience interests. Or draft new pieces that double-down on your hottest subject domains. And don't be afraid to stick a fork in articles that have overstayed their welcome.
But your audits shouldn't stop at weighing content's continued relevance.
Scrutinizing SEO Health
For sites that rely on organic search channels for traffic, assessing SEO health should be another pillar of your monthly maintenance routine. Are your pages properly indexed and optimized to rank well? Have any technical issues emerged that could be suppressing their performance?
Tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs provide transparent reporting into crucial SEO datapoints like:
- Current page rankings
- Organic search visibility trends
- Site experience and page speed metrics
- Disavowed backlink toxicity
Cross-reference these insights with your ongoing content and front-end optimizations. A holistic perspective allows you to confidently update or recreate pieces that have seen ranking drops. While implementing technical fixes that may have flown under the radar, like rendering blockers or sitemap errors.
The more attentive you remain to the evolving SEO landscape, the better insulated your site will be from disruptive algo updates or penalties down the line.
