One of the wonderful things about websites (in contrast to static marketing like brochures or print advertisement) is that they’re dynamic—easily updated and constantly changing— which means they can grow and evolve quickly, along with your business.
But even though you’re able to constantly update your website as needed, any time of year, it’s also a great idea to do a periodic website review and “refresh.”
Why it’s important to review & enhance your website
There are a few reasons it’s important to do a full website review every now and then. Especially as your website grows and includes an increasing amount of content (such as blog posts), it’s helpful to review everything in one fell swoop to:
Ensure your website is kept up-to-date with any changing information or processes in your business.
Check that everything is functioning and displaying properly throughout your site.
Optimise your sales funnel and conversion rates.
Improve SEO and internal linking throughout your site (aka retain more readers and rank higher in search results!).
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HOW TO “SPRING CLEAN” YOUR WEBSITE
Here are our top tips for spring cleaning your website to ensure it’s both up-to-date and optimised for your business goals:
Update content & information
First up, it’s a good idea to review your entire site with an eye for the following details and opportunities:
Update or enhance information as needed
Is there any new content or business information that hasn’t made it to all corners of your website yet?
(For example: team members changing, new contact info, updated store hours, the copyright date in your footer, etc.)
Another common place this can be helpful is older blog posts. If your blog posts are evergreen (undated), there might be opportunities to add or update content within certain posts—for example, if information has changed since it was originally written, or you have new best practices to elaborate on. When reviewing your older blog posts, keep an eye out for any areas you could bolster them with additional information or added value.
Review for new internal linking opportunities
As you’re reviewing your site, look for any additional internal linking opportunities (aka, places you can link to your other relevant content). Often, new blog posts are published that could be linked to from older blog posts. Or, a new resource or product/service offering has been launched that could be linked to or promoted elsewhere on the website.
Reviewing older content and taking advantage of these new internal linking opportunities helps to both boost SEO, as well as connect your website visitors with more relevant content that may be of interest to them.
Review & clarify call-to-actions
Another key element to assess as you’re reviewing your site is your call-to-actions. As you look through, ensure that every page has a clear and specific call-to-action (even if that’s a link to another page that continues your website visitors’ journey in your sales funnel).
Check for (& fix!) broken links
It happens to the best of us: links break. Maybe the page they were linking to was taken down, or its URL changed. Especially for external links, we don’t have much control over this happening (nor any advance notice about it).
It’s just a feature of website maintenance that we need to periodically check for (and fix!) broken links. It’s important to fix them, because broken links are both a) unhelpful to website visitors, and b) harmful to SEO.
We typically recommend checking for broken links monthly or bi-monthly, but your “spring clean” is as good a time as any!
There are plenty of free tools available online, like brokenlinkcheck.com.
Review your website analytics
Though it’s a good idea to monitor your website analytics on an ongoing basis, a formal “spring clean” is a great time to take a deep dive into your site’s analytics dashboard—and the insights it has to offer about your traffic sources, content performance, and conversion rates.
Studying this information can highlight opportunities for improvement—how you can publish more high-performing content, improve call-to-action conversion rates, enhance marketing efforts for your key traffic sources, etc.
Review & enhance SEO
There’s quite a bit you can do in the back-end of your website to boost SEO and help your web-pages rank higher in search results. (WordPress, our favourite platform to build on, makes this particularly easy to do without any advanced web development or coding knowledge.)
Reviewing your entire site for SEO improvements is a worthy project any time of year, but it’s definitely a recommended addition to your “spring cleaning” efforts.
Review on mobile
A quick check into your website analytics will give you the details for your own site, but in general, most sites these days can expect to receive about half their traffic from mobile devices. That means, the way your site looks and functions on mobile is equally important as the way it looks and functions on desktop!
After reviewing and making updates to your site content on desktop, it’s also important to look through the entire site on mobile (and don’t forget tablet!) to confirm that everything is displaying and functioning properly there too.
If you don’t own a tablet to check your site on, the WordPress editing interface has a useful toggle between desktop, tablet and mobile screen views.