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Vietnamese Recently we shared some ideas to help locked-down marketers keep busy during the COVID-19 crisis, and one of our suggestions was that this is the ideal time to do that website spring clean you’ve almost certainly been putting off for ages! Obviously, if your website is perfect you can skip this article, but we suspect even the most assiduously-maintained site would benefit from a bit of tweaking. So here’s our checklist for sprucing up and optimising your business’s most important sales tool.
The technical stuff
Website Performance
Is your website loading quickly or could it do with a boost? Check the speed at Pingdom, and if your site is slow, have a chat to your webmaster and discuss ways to speed it up - pingdom will flag any bottlenecks for you.
Hosting and Plugins
Is your web hosting account, SSL certificate, whois info, PHP version etc all up to date? If you’re using Wordpress, are you using the latest version? Do any plugins need updating?
Forms and CTAs
Are your forms and CTAs up to date? Are they still linking to the right databases, CRM lists or content?
RSS Feed
Do you have an RSS feed? If so, is it still working?
Links
Are all your internal and external links still working and linking to the right pages? If you have backlinks, are they still landing on the correct page? Try running your site through Broken Link Checker to check for those dreaded 404s.
Social Media
Does all your content have social media sharing widgets? Are the links to your own social media accounts working correctly? Are there any new social media channels (e.g., TikTok, Snapchat) that you might want to consider adding?
The update stuff
News
If you have a company or industry news page, when did you last update it? Is the content on there still relevant/ appropriate? If you have a newsletter archive, have your most recent newsletters been added?
Events Calendar
Is your calendar up to date? Have you thought about adding some digital events, e.g., webinars or online networking, during the lockdown?
About Us
Your About Us page is one of the most important on your site, so make sure your company info is up to date. And also make sure your Team pages have been updated to add your newest staff and remove those who’ve left, as well as everybody’s contact information being up to date.
The content stuff
Content Audit
Now is a good time to take stock of your existing content, both the stuff that’s on your site and also the stuff you no doubt have stashed away in various folders on your hard drive, Google Drive or Dropbox. Getting your content organised logically will make it easier to find in future.
Content Optimisation
Optimisation doesn’t stop once you publish a piece of content; there is always scope for improvement, so go back to those old articles and check for missing header, image and meta tags, uncompressed images, missing keywords, dead links, missing CTAs etc. Also check that information, statistics, infographics and quotes contained in the content are all up to date too.
Have a look at each piece of content’s SEO performance. If a page isn’t getting much traffic, why? And if a page is a top performer, what can you do to enhance that performance even further?
Content Repurposing
Content is flexible and versatile and one website article can be turned into several other formats. Look at your top performing articles and think about how you could turn them into white papers, slide decks, videos, infographics, webinars, e-books, or podcasts.
New Content
This is the perfect time to take a look at your 2020 content calendar and either tweak it in the light of the current business situation, or make a head start on creating content for the rest of the year.
The pretty stuff
Look & Feel
Does your site still look as sexy and stylish as it did when you first set eyes on it, or has the attraction gone? If it’s the latter, think about giving the look and feel a clean up. You probably won’t need a complete redesign, but small changes such as adjusting the colour palette, changing your font combinations, or updating your hero images can have a big impact. Have a look at this article about web design trends for 2020 to see what’s hip and happening in the world of website aesthetics.
Navigation
Does your navigation still make sense? Is it easy for your audience to find what they’re looking for with a minimum of clicking? Have a look at your navigation structure and menus and make sure everything is up to date, particularly any new pages you’ve added recently - are they included in your main menu?
This list should ensure you’re ticking off all the key tasks in keeping your website looking good and performing well. Follow us for more web design tips and tricks!
Check your website!
Our partners at Hubspot have a FREE website grader where you can check your site's performance. Click here and enter your site's URL, and the grader will do the rest!
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