Business Spring Cleaning: Sparkling Clean Website Performance

The business spring cleaning continues!

Last week we discussed cleaning up your social channels.

This week we move on to your website performance.

Disclaimer: There are some website performance  tasks you need to save for a web developer.

Please do not attempt to do anything you don’t feel capable of doing or without a back-up of your site.

Website Performance: Operations 

This is an initial list to give you a better sense of website status, and anything you might need to do to improve performance and user interface.

If you keep tabs on these things, you’ll understand when something disrupts the site rank or user experience (and therefore sends prospects away).

It also allows you to be proactive and know when to call a developer in to help take things a step further.

If you really need to dig into performance issues, this is a really nice comprehensive list to review.

• How’s your speed? Google speed test is amazing. Not only does it show you where you can improve, on both mobile and browser (categorized into red and yellow items), it give you (and your developer) insight into what needs to be done to fix it. Thanks Google!
• Are you mobile friendly? We all know mobile friendliness is HUGE for Google, and in turn, your search rankings. The Google mobile friendliness test is, therefore, your BFF. If your site is not mobile friendly it gives you information about what is needed to become compliant. If it is, you can run a mobile usability test to see if there is anything you can improve upon.
• Do you have broken links? Use this broken link checker to find and fix them!
• Are your plugins up-to-date? If not, make a backup of your site and update them. Be smart about this. If there are plugin updates that need to be made which affect the theme or other major foundational or design elements of the website, please contact a web developer first.
• Is your security in check? How many people have access to your site? Do all the current users still need access? Do you need to change the permission for any current users?
• Moz out. If you’ve never spent some quality time with the info Moz provides about your website, you’ve never experienced pure nerdy bliss! Start with Open Site Explorer, but dig into all the tools provided (especially if you have a pro account).

Website Performance: Experience

• Do your newsletter sign-up and call-to-action forms work correctly?
• Does your brand on-site match your brand elsewhere? Such as your social channels and collateral materials?
• Is your about page up-to-date? Does it focus on the customer needs vs. you (as Gini Dietrich says, “take out the French,” and eliminate the “we, we, we”).
• Is team information up-to-date?
• Same with products, locations, and basic organizational information?
• Walk through your buyer’s journey from every entrance point. Find details of this process here.
• Check out your Google Analytics. Set some benchmarks and measure your work (if you aren’t already).

And there you have it. Step two in our business spring cleaning extravaganza: Your website performance.

What else would you add to this list?

About Laura Petrolino

Laura Petrolino is the chief client officer at Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm. She also is a weekly contributor to the award-winning PR blog, Spin Sucks. Join the Spin Sucks   community.

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