Welcome to August everyone, I hope July was good for you and that you can look back over last month and feel like you made honest progress towards your goals. This post will be short but important for the performance of your site. I like to take advantage of a few things on the start of each month, one of them being due to the fact that my site stats start over again.

If you use Awstats like I do, you will notice a section on the bottom of the stats page where yo can see a list of all your 404 errors, if your site is messed up and generating a lot of these errors that list will be almost unmanageable by the time the end of each month comes around and can account for a pile of wasted bandwidth. You should take advantage of a fresh start each month and watch your stats closely for the first few days, if you see a 404 pop up on that list, look into it and fix the problem.

You will likely not be able to “fix” every issue as not all 404’s are a result of something being wrong on your site, some will come from scrapers or hackers etc looking for vunerabilities in yout site but you can certainly fix any legitimate 404 not found errors that relate to broken links on your site, links to css files that are wrong and so on and so forth.

Spending 10 minutes each day for the first 3 or 4 days of each month is a good way to ensure your site is working properly, that you arent wasting any bandwidth and that your site visitors experience while on your site is a pleasant as possible.