Author Website Maintenance and Updates by Your VA
An author's website is often the most neglected piece of their publishing infrastructure, not because authors don't know it matters but because it requires a different kind of attention than writing or marketing — it's maintenance work, the kind that never produces a visible result when you do it but creates a quiet, persistent problem when you don't. The release date that still says 'coming soon' two months after the book launched. The blog that hasn't had a new post in fourteen months. The home page hero image that's still promoting last year's biggest title. The buy links on book pages that go to Amazon but nowhere else.
These aren't catastrophic failures — readers don't usually leave because of them. But they signal something to anyone who visits your site: that this is a business that isn't quite on top of itself. And for the reader who found you through a Google search and is deciding whether to trust you enough to buy a book, that signal matters. A VA with a monthly website maintenance schedule and a launch-specific update checklist keeps your website current, accurate, and functional as a constant, passive part of your author brand — without requiring your direct involvement most of the time.
What a VA Can Own on Your Author Website
Website maintenance tasks break cleanly into two categories: recurring maintenance that happens on a regular schedule regardless of what else is going on in your publishing business, and event-triggered updates that happen specifically when you launch a new book, change your branding, or make a strategic shift in your catalog.
Recurring Maintenance
Link checking: running a link checker monthly (tools like Screaming Frog or Broken Link Checker do this automatically) to find any internal or external links that have broken, and fixing or removing them
Plugin and theme updates: for WordPress sites, keeping the theme and plugins current to prevent security vulnerabilities and ensure compatibility — this is genuinely time-sensitive and often overlooked by authors who aren't actively managing their site
Performance monitoring: checking site load speed periodically (Google PageSpeed Insights), flagging any significant degradation, and escalating to a developer if the issue is beyond the VA's scope
Contact form testing: confirming your contact form is working and that submissions are reaching the correct inbox — a broken contact form is invisible to the author until someone mentions in person that they tried to reach you and couldn't
Newsletter signup testing: confirming that your signup forms are delivering to the right list and that the welcome email is triggering correctly
Google Search Console monitoring: checking for crawl errors, security issues, or manual penalties that might be suppressing your site's visibility in search results
Event-Triggered Updates: New Book Launch
Every new book launch requires a specific set of website updates that benefit enormously from having a checklist and a VA to run it. Without one, something inevitably gets missed.
Blog and Content Publishing
If content marketing is part of your author strategy — covered in the Marketing section of this resource library — your VA can own the publishing workflow for your blog even if the writing itself stays with you. This separation is clean and efficient: you write or record the content (or outline it for a VA who produces a draft for your revision), and your VA handles everything from that point forward.
Formatting the post in your website's CMS — applying the correct heading structure, paragraph breaks, and image placement
Adding and optimizing the featured image — selecting from your asset library or Canva, sizing correctly for your theme, adding alt text for accessibility and SEO
Basic on-page SEO — writing the meta title and meta description, setting the URL slug, adding relevant internal links to other posts or book pages, and ensuring the post is assigned to the correct categories and tags
Scheduling the publication at the optimal time based on your traffic data
Sharing the post across your social platforms via your scheduling tool once it's live
Basic On-Page SEO: The VA Task Most Authors Skip
Most indie authors publish website content — blog posts, book pages, the home page — without any deliberate on-page SEO: no attention to the URL structure, no meta descriptions, no internal linking, no image alt text. This isn't because they don't know it matters; it's because it takes time and they're focused on the content itself. A VA who has been taught your basic SEO approach can apply it consistently to every piece of content that goes on your site, at no additional cost to your time.
The on-page SEO tasks that make a material difference for author websites are straightforward enough that a VA without prior SEO experience can learn them in a few hours and apply them consistently. Your VA doesn't need to be an SEO expert. They need to know: how to write a descriptive URL that includes relevant keywords, how to write a meta title and meta description that accurately describe the page, how to add alt text to images, and how to include one or two internal links in each piece of content. That's 80% of basic on-page SEO applied to an author website, and it compounds significantly over time as your content library grows.
Access and Permission Levels
Website access is one of the more sensitive grants in your VA toolkit because the consequences of errors are visible to every reader who visits your site. Set your VA's access level at the minimum needed for their tasks — typically Editor in WordPress (can publish and edit content, upload media, but can't change themes, install plugins, or access billing) or the equivalent in Squarespace or Wix.
Build an explicit approval protocol into your SOP for any change that affects your site's structure or navigation — new pages, navigation changes, template modifications, or plugin installations should require your sign-off before implementation, even if your VA is confident about the change. Content updates (new blog posts, book page additions, link fixes) can typically be handled by your VA independently once the SOP is in place and a few successful updates have confirmed their accuracy.
⚠ Structural website changes — changing your theme, modifying your site's CSS or code, installing new plugins, or migrating to a new host — should never be made by a VA without either explicit authorization from you or a development professional's involvement. These changes can break a site in ways that are visible to every reader immediately. If your VA encounters a technical issue that seems to require structural intervention, the correct response is to flag it to you rather than attempt a fix.
Monthly Website Audit: The Routine That Prevents Problems
The most valuable recurring website task a VA can own is a monthly audit — a structured check of your site's core elements to confirm everything is working as expected. This doesn't need to be comprehensive; a thirty-minute check against a standard checklist catches the majority of the issues that would otherwise go unnoticed for months.
Home page: correct featured book, working links, up-to-date newsletter signup integration
All book pages: correct metadata, working buy links across all retailers, cover images displaying correctly
Contact form: submission delivers correctly to your inbox
Newsletter signup forms: submissions connecting to the correct list and triggering the welcome sequence
Blog: no draft posts accidentally published, all scheduled posts live
Broken links: quick scan with a link checking tool, fix or remove any broken links found
Google Search Console: no new errors or warnings requiring attention
Conclusion
Your author website is the one piece of your marketing infrastructure that you own outright and that every other channel eventually points toward — it deserves better maintenance than most authors give it. A VA with a monthly audit habit and a launch-specific update checklist keeps it current, accurate, and functional as a passive, continuous part of your author brand. The next article covers a different kind of discoverability maintenance: metadata, keywords, and category research — the ongoing optimization work that keeps your books visible in retail search.
Hello, I'm Randall Wood. When I'm not pounding the keyboard or entertaining my giant dog I like to build tools for my fellow indie authors. In these articles, you'll find lessons learned over sixteen years spent in the indie author world. I share it all here to help you get one step closer to where you want to be.— Randall