Spring Cleaning for Your Website
5 Website Updates and Maintence Tasks You Should Do This Month
Spring is the perfect time to do website updates and maintenance! Many small business owners make the mistake of neglecting their website. While your website isn’t something you need to revisit every day, you should check on it regularly for several reasons. To start, it’s important to ensure all the information on your site is accurate and up to date. Next, you should make sure everything is working and functioning as it should. Here are 5 areas you should evaluate while doing website updates and maintenance this spring.
The Spring Cleaning for Your Website Checklist
Accuracy and Relevancy - Review your content for accuracy and relevancy. You should look at things like your business hours, policies, service list, pricing and about us page. Make sure everything is up to date. Then review the same information for relevancy. Things change and businesses change. Make sure that you're sending the right message to your website visitors. Does the tone of your content still match your business's vibe? Have you shifted focus in your business? If so, you may want to refresh your content to highlight the new services you're focused on providing. Bottom line, review your content and make sure everything is accurate and relevant.
Images - If you're using old images, it's the perfect time to swap some of them out for new, fresh images. Before adding them, make sure they are the proper resolution and size. It’s also important to compress images to a web friendly size so that they do not slow down the speed of your site. Google really likes fast, responsive website designs. Then, make sure you're adding the proper information on the back end for SEO like alt tags! If you have a Squarespace website, go to the SEO section and it will tell you if any of your images are missing alt tags.
Security - This is a big one! A lot of people think their site is secure...until it's not. If you have a Squarespace website, which most of my clients do, you are covered in this area as Squarespace has a built SSL certificate and they take care of security patches for you. But if you’re doing website maintenance on a site that is built on another platform, especially WordPress, I encourage you to take a good hard look at your website's security and back up methods. If you don't have an SSL, it's time to add one. If you don't have a back up method in place and your hosting company doesn't save back ups, make sure you implement a plan before it's too late. Once a hacker has gained access to your site, the only option is to fix the site. In the process, if you don't have back ups, you could loose content and more.
Take a look at your SEO - If SEO is something you focused on when you first built the site, it's probably time to revisit it. SEO should be an ongoing effort, but if you haven't been able to do that, doing an SEO evaluation every once and while is better than nothing. While there are MANY things involved in SEO a few key things to look at include:
Overall look and feel - Does your site represent your business the way it should? Be honest here. If your site is outdated, unresponsive, has a confusing navigation or is just plain ugly, you could be turning customers away. Your website should match your brand and be in line with what customers will experience when they walk in to your space. If you're running a brand new spa that's offering the latest products and services, but your website was built by your neighbor who has no formal web development skills it may be time for a website makeover.
BONUS Tips
While you’re going through the site, check for broken links, test your forms to make sure they are going to the right email and run a speed check using Google’s Page Speed Insights. If you have a Squarespace site, check the SEO section for updates that you can make too.
As always, if you need help with spring cleaning for your website, not your house LOL, contact me! I offer several options to help you get your website updated including conducting an audit that provides suggestions you can implement yourself, or I can do them for you. If you’re interested in learning more, contact me by scheduling a Fit Call or sending me an email. Happy cleaning!
