What with us all being at home at the moment, all the odd jobs that needed are doing are probably finally getting ticked off the list. If giving your website a good old spring clean isn’t on your list, pop it on there. Fancy dancy, hyper efficient websites are our specialist subject, so we’ve prepared a checklist to help you review your website. (Or you can cheat, and ask us to do it for you).
Don’t worry, we’re not suggesting a full re-brand and website. These are just suggestions to help businesses ensure their website is attracting and retaining the right audience.
Have a plugin clearout
If there is a seemingly endless list of plugins attached to your website, work through the list and get rid of any that aren’t bringing value to your site. Having too many plugins can bog your website down so that it runs more slowly, which is a real turn-off for visitors and search engines.
Out of date plugins can also be a security risk, so remember to update any plugins that you keep! Ideally, keep some analytics, SEO, social media and email marketing tools installed, plus anything essential to making the site work. But otherwise, we bet you’ll find at least a couple of plugins that you can’t even remember installing in the first place.
Check broken links
Broken links are where a link on your website doesn’t actually lead to anything. For instance, if the page has moved or been replaced.
We sometimes whisper the words ‘broken links’ at our SEO manager (swiftly followed by handing him a coffee and a twix), because they are toxic for a website’s performance in search. A broken link means that Google, or another search engine, can’t crawl through the site as effectively, and will probably downgrade its usefulness as a search result.
Broken links can also affect navigation for your site’s visitors, making it difficult to find information and causing them to become frustrated. And when that happens? Off they pop to the competition – ouch!
Luckily, there are broken link checker tools so you won’t have to manually check every single link on your site.
Spend some time creating internal links
Internal linking between pages and blog posts on your website ensures that your visitors have somewhere else to go after they’ve finished reading a page, or to find out more information on a topic.
Having visitors spend more time on your website looks good to search engines, which is a big plus for SEO. Equally important is that this means you’re providing site visitors with a good user experience, which is key.
Spend some time going through your pages and blogs, and check that they link to any relevant topics published elsewhere on your site. For instance, a blog about garden tools might link to your page about sheds!
Check everything on mobile
Hopefully, you’ve already given mobile browsing a thought when you were building your website. More and more people visit websites through a mobile device so it’s vital that your site looks just as good on a smartphone.
This is especially important for online stores or any sort of online checkout – poorly designed websites can look like a scam, and visitors will be reluctant to hand over their money!
Don’t just stop at the look of it though. Make sure you’re testing links, buttons and menus to ensure everything is functional. It’s easy to miss bugs or errors and your website visitors are unlikely to tell you about them, so you need to check yourself.
Do a content audit
Content is KING. Yes, the content writer wrote these words, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true. The content on your website is the reason that people visit. Lure them in, entice and engage them, educate, inform, entertain.
Content is the cornerstone of SEO, and they rely on each other to function .
Is the content on your website doing its job? Does it read well, and fit in with the tone of voice of your brand? Give it another proofread to check everything is correct and makes sense. Take time to update the copy to reflect any changes you’ve made in your business.
A more in-depth content audit means looking at the topics and types of content are performing well on a website, so you can create more of it. For instance, if you find that the analytics for an infographic you created are much higher than any blog post, aim to create more of them in the future.
It will help build a good content strategy that is based on more than just guesswork.
Blimey, it’s almost like we know what we’re talking about!
