Webmasters’ basics with useful tools and tips

Maintaining, developing and promoting websites is a daunting task. In the face of serious competition, website owners have to perform several functions at once. A novice webmaster must combine the duties of a system administrator, programmer, designer, copywriter, moderator, and even a support person. Covering all of these functions is not easy.

Webmaster’s 101

If we talk specifically about what a novice webmaster should know, he can’t do without the skills to work with:

• Robots.txt index file.
• Website meta-tags.
• Web-server setup and maintenance.
• DBMS (Database Management System).

All of the above tasks themselves are not easy for a beginner, so it’s worth taking a closer look at them.

Robots.txt index file

Robots.txt is an index file saved in UTF-8 encoding. This file is designed for search engine crawlers that index pages on the website. It gives recommendations about what pages and files should be crawled and indexed. Many novice webmasters wonder how to check robots tcht? This is done very simply. It is enough to add to the URL of the website /robots.txt. You can also use free tools from Google to check the correctness of this file.

Website meta-tags

If we talk in simple terms about what are the meta-tags of a website, then under this concept concealed lines of code page, designed for search engine crawlers. These lines tell the robots about the subject page. It’s a vital thing for search engines and ads campaigns. Mainly because properly compiled meta-tags can significantly improve the position of the website in search results. 

Web-server setup and maintenance

The existence of the website is impossible without understanding the peculiarities of web servers. Webmaster must understand how these servers handle HTTP requests from users, how they respond, etc. Today the most popular web server is Apache. It hosts 2/3 of websites all around the world. Nginx, Lighttpd and IIS servers are also in demand, yet those are less popular nowadays.

DBMS (Database Management System)

The full-fledged work of the website provides for the use of a DBMS in which all the accumulated information will be stored. The most common Database Management System is MySql. This database is supported by all modern CMS services. It should also be added that when studying the features of the DBMS, a webmaster should master one of the server-side programming languages (PHP, Python, Perl, etc.). It will be an almost vital requirement for webmasters in terms of managing DBMS service with ease.

What is website monitoring?

The term “website monitoring” refers to any activity that checks the availability, performance and functionality of a website or web server. As a rule, most often we are talking about an automated process, most often about monitoring the availability of websites. Manual testing is time consuming when considering the large number of variables that affect the proper functioning of a website. Therefore, novice webmasters should focus on finding specialized monitoring services that will greatly simplify the webmaster’s work.

Uptime monitoring – why is it important?

In general, uptime monitoring is literally an accessibility monitoring. Or, in other words, ensuring that a website is always accessible and functional. Accessibility can include web services, domains, and pages. If your customers visit your website frequently, you need a high level of uptime so that your customers are satisfied and receive the information or services they need. If the problem of downtime remains unresolved for a long period, then most likely your customers can switch to one of your competitors.

On top of all of the above, Google obviously doesn’t like websites that aren’t online. If your website has persistent problems with downtime for one or more days, Google may impose strict penalties for ranking in search results. The search rankings of your web pages are affected by the downtime and speed of your website.

Performance monitoring

Overall website performance monitoring is necessary to check the loading speed of a website. The performance check monitors incoming and outgoing connection speeds and web page load times in the browser. A full page check collects performance data for every element on the page, displaying warnings about errors, missing content, and poor performance.

Web API monitoring

Web application monitoring or functionality monitoring is required for website functionality testing. This means you need to provide testing of the script files that interact with contact forms. This includes, but not limited to, search form, shopping cart and payment system. If an error or performance degradation occurs, the system issues a corresponding warning. 

Ways to monitor your website effectively

Round-the-clock monitoring of a website is very important for maintaining a website. After all, sometimes even a seemingly minor problem with the stability or availability of a website can cause a lot of problems, and if you are the owner of the website or its webmaster, these problems will become your own pain below the back.

Thus, 24/7 monitoring will allow you to avoid these problems so that visitors to your website can use it without any problems. However, daily manual monitoring of a website takes a lot of time, and in order to free it, the webmaster needs to use a useful automated service.

All you need for a complete picture of the state of the website as a whole is the HostTracker service. You will be able to find out not only that the website has stopped working, but also when and why. Moreover, you will be able to track when it began to load slowly, creating inconvenience to customers. The company saves you money and time, because the diagnosis and correction of problems become faster, which means that the downtime is less.

Why is having a stable web hosting vital?

Web hosting is literally a place to host Internet projects on physical and virtual servers connected to the Internet to ensure that websites are continuously present on the Web. Generally, this is a service that will provide your Internet resources with a presence on the Internet for the period for which you ordered and paid for this service. So, the first important conclusion: if you decide to create and launch a website on the Internet, it will need hosting. 

Whenever someone enters the name of the website in the address bar of the browser, the host transmits all the data required to serve the request: texts, images, files, and so on. And if the server will not cope with their task, the user simply can not use a resource. Because it will work slowly or not available. And sometimes you can even lose the Internet resource.

Considering all the above, reliable hosting is very important because the servers designed for it work without interruption. Good hosting provides a seamless service for your content, allows you to provide your visitors with a great interface, and attracts more and more new people to your website.

When choosing this service, base it on your needs and try to anticipate the future to avoid possible problems as you go along. Budget hosting providers usually focus exclusively on offering shared hosting services, which means that when your project requires more resources and you’re ready to move to a VPS or even rent a dedicated server, you will have to change hosting. Choose your hosting with the future in mind.