The start of a new year is a great time to do a little housekeeping, and if you have a website (or other digital marketing, communications channels), that means it’s time to go through your digital checklist to make sure that everything is up and running in top shape.  Your website maintenance checklist should take you through everything from making sure your copyright date is correct, to ensuring your site complies with the ever-changing search criteria of search engines.  

In such a fast-paced digital world, it’s never been more important to keep your website operating at its highest function.  So, where should you begin?  Here are a few things that should be at the top of your website checklist:  

  • General Housekeeping – Now is the time to ensure that your website platform (or CMS) is up to date.  Conduct regular backups and make them a consistent part of your website’s maintenance plan.  This will ensure that all plugins are regularly updated and all security patches, warnings, etc. are handled as soon as they pop up.  If your hosting plan doesn’t offer this support, consider upgrading your package, because a little extra money upfront can save you from site downtime and permanent loss of data in the long run.
  • Dated Content – Not only does out-of-date content tell visitors that you don’t keep up with your website, it also signals to search engines that you don’t regularly update your site, which means that you may lose potential traffic to newer, recently updated sites.  Combat this by updating your copyright date, company pages, contact pages, product or service prices (if necessary), and remove any dated content (e.g. old event dates).  Then, run a check on all of your links in case any are broken that need to be fixed.  
  • Security – You should always run security updates on your website.  It should be a regular part of your website’s maintenance.  More than that, Google will now flag your site if it doesn’t conduct business (e.g. collect passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) through a secure connection, like HTTP or HTTPS, and will let visitors know that your website doesn’t have data security.  Therefore, it is in your best interest to secure your website and ultimately boost eyes on your site.
  • Speed – A major point on your website checklist should be to evaluate your website’s speed.  As modern, in-demand trends continue, Google wants to enable sites to load in an instant on any Internet-enabled device.  Even larger content like graphics, videos, animations and other media are expected to load in milliseconds.  The AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) framework is already in place, so it’s time to check your site’s load speed and do everything that you can to reduce the time it takes your pages to load.
  • Mobile – If you are not yet thinking about mobile capabilities, you should be.  The Google algorithm is making a huge shift from evaluating desktop websites to mobile indexing.  For you and your website, this means that future ranking signals will not come from your desktop version, rather it will come straight from your mobile site.  Now, if your site is unable to make the grade for mobile usability, your desktop site won’t rank well either.  This latest change has huge implications for web traffic and websites that are not yet fully mobile compliant or don’t yet offer a user-friendly mobile experience.  

For any website hoping to achieve high traffic and good search results, it’s no longer just about the quality of content being displayed or content relevancy.  It’s about user experience.  Websites that are user-friendly, fast and optimized for all devices are the ones that will achieve a higher conversion rate and rank.  So, don’t let your website fall behind.  Make this New Year’s website checklist priority, and 2018 will be filled with rewards. 

Contact a member of our team to get started!