For many in the northern hemisphere, the calendar year’s second quarter welcomes budding flowers, green leaves on trees, fresh air through open windows, warm sunshine, birds singing, and…spring cleaning.
If spring cleaning is part of your routine, or even if it is not, you may want to consider spring cleaning your website. How? Below, we share some easy tips that can help you do just that.
Content review.
Is your website’s content representing the very best of who you are and what you do? Now is a great time to take a step back and look at all the pages of your site. Put your pages into categories of “keep, kill, or redo.” Invest time into your analytics to help inform smart category decisions. What content is performing well? What content is not? A fourth category should then be created, “new.” Identify opportunities for new content that strategically relates to emerging trends or keywords and concepts relating to your business.
Refresh visual communication.
Visitors to your website form an immediate first impression from what they see. Does your photography, accompanying graphics, colors, and layout represent you with excellence and clarity? Is there an opportunity to add some new pictures to help quickly communicate who you are and what you do? Is the intent of your website visually communicated? In each choice, consider your brand standards, voice, and the feeling your brand intends to evoke.
Search for yourself.
Search your brand and your top keywords. Do you like what you see? Content strategies are born out of this exercise. If you are not ranking as high as you’d like for the industry keywords you target, it is time to develop more focused content on thought leadership pertaining to those keywords. Prioritize the most significant keywords that lead to customer conversions for your brand. Other search engine optimization (SEO) strategies should be explored as well. For the brands that do SEO best, their efforts are consistent, measured, and regularly adjusted to accomplish specific goals.
Check your links.
Broken links are a dead end for your site visitors. You want to be more hospitable than that. Whether they are linking to internal or external web pages, fixing broken links can be an easy focus of your spring cleaning. There are many ways that you can check your site for broken links. Some of the more popular methods come from within your chosen CMS, or tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Semrush. No matter how you do it, your website’s user experience will be noticeably improved by this spring cleaning.
Platform, hosting, and plugin check-up.
Content management systems (CMSs) and digital experience providers (DXPs) release occasional updates to their platforms. Are you on the most recent version? Should you be? Use this spring-cleaning period to assess your current web solution. Is your hosting service providing you the uptime, service, and security that meets your expectations? Also, consider plug-ins. Your website may or may not utilize plugins. If yours does, plugins are also updated occasionally. An annual review should be a minimum standard for evaluating your platform, hosting, and plugins. If you are not doing this on a consistent schedule, or at all, add it to your spring-cleaning checklist.
Improve accessibility.
The internet has provided the world with unprecedented access to information and functionality. Aim to ensure everyone has access. Thoughtful attention to accessibility considerations within your website can promote a successful digital experience for all users. Some easy steps to improve accessibility include utilizing page titles within H1 header tags and maximizing H2 header tags for section titles within your page content. Diligently include descriptive alt tag information on all your website's images. Also, label forms clearly.
Very few people look forward to spring cleaning, but the refreshing feeling of accomplishment when it is completed is undeniable. Trust us, your efforts will be worth it. If at any time you run into a job that seems too much for you to handle, Americaneagle.com is here to help.