Regularly updating and maintaining your website is crucial to the success of your online presence.
As the year draws to a close and to move forward, you need to know what went right and what mistakes you've made.
Let’s go through a year-end website checklist to set up success in the New Year.
Website Analytics
If your website has Google Analytics or another analytics platform connected,
right now is a great chance to analyze your metrics from the past year.
Review your website traffic and user behavior to study how users
come to your site and what they do when they get there.
Look for areas for improvement where you can make the customer experience more efficient
based on the knowledge you gained through this analysis.
You can see what types of content attracted most visitors and where the traffic came from to get there.
Test website performance and speed
You can use
Google PageSpeed Insights
to check your website speed and make improvements.
Improving site speed not only improves visitor satisfaction but also has a direct influence on your search rankings.
In fact, site speed is one of the few ranking factors Google has confirmed.
Measures you can take to increase site speed include minimizing HTTP requests, reducing server response time, enabling compression,
enabling browser caching,
minifying resources, optimizing images, reduce the number of plugins on the site and so on.
In the meanwhile, resolve broken links or error pages to check for any indexing issues the website may have.
Check renewal dates of domain, hosting and SSL
As a domain registrar and DNS and email hosting company, our support staff have seen in many cases that
businesses have no idea where they can access their domains, how much they are paying, or when the renewals are.
They sometimes count on employees or the original website designers to keep this information,
but lose track of it when the employee leaves.
You should take the time to centralize this information by making a secure spreadsheet
with the provider name, login info, costs, and renewal dates and have calendar reminders of when the items renew.
If the service is set to auto-renew, be sure to update your credit card information on file.
We have seen many instances where domains have expired and websites have gone offline
because the auto-renewal billing information was not updated.
Technical SEO review
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays an essential role in your digital strategy.
Without SEO, potential customers will have a hard time finding your site,
which makes it difficult to capture traffic and lead to online sales.
Be sure to review your meta tags, titles, and descriptions for relevance and
accuracy and incorporate new keywords and phrases throughout the site content to tap into new markets and search terms.
You can also look into starting a blog area and online forum to encourage user interaction and create more keyword-related content.
Mobile Compatibility
As smartphones and tablets become more accessible, consumers have developed a preference for mobile surfing.
In 2021, Statista reported approximately 7.1 billion mobile users generating almost 55% of global website traffic.
Mobile usability is crucial for user experience and SEO in this day and age.
Confirm that your website is mobile-responsive and renders well on various devices and screen sizes.
The year-end website chec...