It’s easy to get lost in the daily grind of running your site and forget to really take inventory of the overall user experience. It’s important to ensure every facet of your website is ultimately the best representation of your business.
Running through routine check-ins of your website will help prevent your content from becoming static and outdated.
We’ve put together a list of the best quarterly housekeeping tips for your website.
1: Do Some Cleanup
Sometimes you just need to do a deep-clean! It’s a good practice to go through your site page-by-page and clean up any unnecessary or outdated information – and the big one – make sure all your links still work!
2: Review Your Menu
Often times your menu can become the kitchen junk drawer. Be sure to look at what you are including in the menu and make sure it hasn’t become unruly.
Double-check your site navigation and make sure you only have essential pages listed. If you have too many options in your top navigation, visitors will become overwhelmed and not know where to start.
3: Review Your Graphics
This one seems simple enough, but honestly can be easily missed. Doing a scan of your main pages for graphics that might be outdated. Maybe you’ve recently revamped your branding by using a new font or tweaking your color palette slightly. Do all the graphics on your site reflect the visual identity of your business?
4: Homepage Review
I’d spend the most time on this piece! Really dig into your homepage and the content, graphics, layout and overall user experience of your homepage. After all, this is most likely the first interactive users have with your brand.
A few questions to ask yourself:
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- Is the content relevant, timely and what you want your users to see?
- What is missing? Is there something your offer your readers and is missing from your homepage?
- What decluttering can be done? What can be updated or every refreshed slightly? Maybe even rotating in older content to give it new life.
- What ads are appearing? Are these current paid partners? (See point #5.)
5: AdRotate Audit
I’m sure you had some audible sighs and ughs with this one, but yes it is important to review AdRotate and ensure all ads are running or NOT running as contracted. Any expired ads that you no longer needs statistics for can be deleted and cleaned up.
6: Event Listing Audit
Another one of the not-so-fun clean-up tasks, but going through event listings and getting rid of any past events and/or ensuring your next month’s calendars are full of events and provide a robust content offering.
7: Check Contact Form Submissions
Be sure to go FORMS on the backend of your website and review any contact submissions you may have missed. I’d actually recommend doing this more often than quarterly, but it’s important to start somewhere!
8: Google Analytics
Again, something you should be digging into more than quarterly, but please take a moment to actually LOGIN to google.com/analytics and poke around. See if anything looks off (i.e. a dip in traffic, errors, etc.) and let the tech team know!
9: Team Pages Review
We always hate to see people go, but when and if they do, be sure to ensure they have been removed (if necessary) from your team pages and MOST importantly change their user role to “No Role” on the backend of WordPress.
Doing regular housekeeping and check-ins on your website is a crucial part of your business. But sometimes, it can be hard to know where to start or what changes to make to set yourself up for success. Hopefully this quick list of items gets you headed the right direction!
As always, if you have any questions please feel free to drop a tech ticket!!