Running a website or a blog is a timely continous task. There is not a time, ever, that the website should be down at any point of the year. For this reason, in some sense, running and owning a website/blog is the worst type of job to have if you like to take holiday breaks – how on earth do you make sure your blog runs smoothly whilst on holiday? Well, there are many ways to do this, as I will outline two in this article. But, before I go in, it should be noted that these are general points that worked well for me as a freelancer and the owner of a multitude of websites.

#1 Work Extra Hard Before Your Holiday

The first step to make sure that your websites are up and running when you are on holiday is to do all of the work you would have done whilst you were on holiday before you go on holiday. This could include:

• Writing all of the articles you were planning to publish and schedule them to be published when you are on holiday.
• Schedule social media tweets/posts and more.
• Prepare your website so that there are no serious issues that need addressing within a short time frame.

Once you have done this, the website will continue to run whilst you are on that Hawaiian beach, sipping on a cocktail watching the sunset…

#2 Inform Your Team and Delegate

Although this goes without saying, some people (including myself!) sometimes do forget to inform the team that they are on holiday. The way I look at informing the team that works for a website is based on the question ‘are the team going to be at any disadvantage from me being on holiday?’ – if the answer is yes, then inform them (rarely is the answer no if you are the main leader and owner of the website).

With this, it is nice to let the team know:

• When and how long you are away for.
  • What is your level of communication during this period.
• What the team should do in the absense of you whilst you are on holiday:
  • Delegate tasks to your team that you would have done that need to be done, possibly.
• What to do if they are unsure of what to do (it happens a lot)!
• How things will resume back to normal once you are back from holiday.

Remember that it is important to keep your team happy since a happy workforce will provide the best work. If you forget to inform them and one of your team sends you an email, for which you reply two weeks later, it will not look good on your part when you tell them the reason why!

Ultimately, the great thing about websites it that there is the flexibility to manage a website even when you are on holiday. For this reason, my final tips would be to check your emails/websites once a day when you are on holiday, for 2-3 minutes at a time. In this, just make sure everything is fine – if there are any burning requests, such as, for example, your website is not loading because of a bug in the code, you can contact a member of your team or look to solve the problem as soon as possible to reduce the downtime of the website.