What You Should Be Doing to Spring Clean Your Website

Once all of the chocolate eggs have been eaten and the Easter lull is out the way, it’s all hands on deck when it comes to the great Spring clean. We’re not just talking about shaking the crumbs out the carpet and having a ruthless cupboard clear out either…

Right now is the perfect time to give your business website a seasonal once-over too and not just because Spring has sprung. The change of pace which has come as a result of the Coronavirus crisis provides the perfect breathing space for you to give your online presence a bit of TLC.

With many of the country’s employees on furlough and economic uncertainty looming for the foreseeable future, business has slowed down. That means there will be less people on your website and less people watching your social media and digital content channels closely.

Granted, this is a worrying concept but with that concern comes a chance to step out of the spotlight and give your business website a refresh under the radar.

Of course, how this takes shape will be unique to your own requirements but we’ve put together a few questions to ask yourself and point you in the right direction…

Are there any broken links lurking on your site?

Broken links are links which don’t work and therefore aren’t navigating to any pages – this could be because the url contains a typo or the destination page no longer exists. Google frowns upon these, which could reflect in where you appear in the search results so they’re worth rooting out and fixing.

There are a whole host of free broken link checkers on the internet which identify the dud links and where they are on your site.

Is your site security as tight as it could be?

Software update reminders are those pesky little notifications that pop up on your screen when you’re in the middle of doing something but they’re not just there to irritate you. They’re there to protect your website from cyber attacks and hacking.

Use the time to update software, plugins and themes to keep your site safe.

Does everything look good and work well on mobile?

One of the latest Google algorithm updates suggests that Google is going to be taking a mobile-first approach to its crawling and indexing. That means it will be prioritising how your website performs on mobile when ranking you on the search engine results pages over desktop. So, it pays to make sure your site is well optimised for mobile.

Is your website loading fast enough?

Load speed is another element Google is hot on checking out when crawling your website. Again, there are plenty of free load speed checkers available on the internet which will help you see if your website is running a bit slow. Resizing images, reducing down other media files like video and cleaning up any duplicate pages are all effective ways to help speed things up a bit.

When was the last time you wrote a blog post?

Regularly pumping fresh, new content onto your website is a vital tactic when it comes to climbing the search ranks and retaining visitors. The best way to do this is through your blog. However, in the chaos of the daily grind, blog-writing can often fall by the wayside. Now is as goo a time as any to get a backlog of well-researched, informative articles to post out to your audience.

Does the content on your landing pages need updating?

Content might be king but its crown can be easily tarnished if it becomes outdated and therefore not very useful in Google’s eyes. Keep it current and relevant by revisiting your landing pages regularly – even if it’s just a case of checking for typos, swapping out a few sentences or adding some additional, useful information.

When was the last time you tested your forms out?

Have you navigated your website as a user recently to see how it functions from their perspective? This is always worth doing to make sure your user experience is on point, including things like testing forms and making sure call to action buttons work.

 

Will you be giving your website a Spring clean? Let us know by joining the conversation on social media using the links below.