Clean Up Your Website Between the Holidays to Start the New Year Fresh
Could be the perfect opportunity!
If your business slows during the last week of the year, that can be the perfect time to tidy up your website so that you hit the ground running in January.
Folks are traveling again this year, so the office may be empty. Or maybe you’ve found that not much happens between Christmas and New Year’s. This is not a super productive time for many small businesses. While you certainly deserve the break, you could also take advantage of these light days to do a deep dive into your business website and clean up all the little tasks you put off during the year. Here are some tasks to take on:
Remove old users
Look to see who has been authorized to make changes on your site. There might be ex-employees or a marketing company you no longer work with. If there isn’t a reason for them to have access, it’s time to remove them.
Delete spam comments
You might have several places where comments are allowed on your website, such as blog posts, FAQs, or testimonial pages. Delete all the spam you haven’t kept up with and check for good comments or questions that may have slipped by you.
Remove old content
Is that event or sale over? Then remove it! A stale website looks, at worst, like you’ve gone out of business or, at best, like you’re lazy. Neither of these is good for your business.
Review your website with an eye toward current goals
While you’re reviewing individual content, evaluate whether the whole still reflects your brand, your marketing goals, and the buyer’s journey you want to present. It’s common for folks to add new pages as needed without realizing that the consistent overall message has become lost. You might want to rearrange pages or change the menu for a better fit.
Check analytics for page popularity
Your website analytics will tell you which pages are most important to your users and which are rarely accessed. Use that information to beef up or rearrange pages.
Delete unused pages
Older websites accumulate a lot of excess bulk. If some of the pages are not worth keeping, go ahead and delete them. Because even outdated pages may be driving some traffic to your site, it could make sense to redirect the deleted page to another with a related topic.
Refine your blog
If your website has blog posts and you still have time on your hands, spruce up your content by fixing spelling and grammar errors, upgrading your images, and checking for bad links. Take a look at your tags as well. If you have more than a dozen, consider pruning them down to ten or twelve more general descriptions and re-assigning them to your posts.
Of course, you may just choose to relax between the holidays and that’s terrific, but your website could still use a little freshening for the new year. If that’s the case, just give us a call and we’ll schedule our team to do the heavy lifting for you.
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels
image by freeimageslive.co.uk - freebie.photography
Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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