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.

Your Website Performance Operations Checklist

• 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: Declutter

Last year Reese Spykerman wrote an awesometastic post about how to clean up your website clutter.

Head on over there and follow her directions to do the following in order to get rid of website clutter:

• Simplify your website navigation and header.
• Standardize your calls to action.
• Remove useless badges.
• Tone down your color scheme.
• Make smart webfont choices.
• Clean up your blog clutter.
• Optimize images.
• Trash plugins and scripts.
• Polish your footer.
• Clean-up old articles.
• Add relevant heading tags.
• …and more.

Website Performance: Experience

• Do your newsletter sign-up and call-to-action forms work correctly?
• What’s going on with your landing pages? (Check out this great recent post from Jon Mikel-Bailey to help them level up.)
• 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).

Quarterly Website Checks

At the beginning of 2019, Chris Williams joined us to discuss the website problems you need to check for every quarter.

They include:

• Website layout
• Link issues
• Backend errors
• Content quality

And all the details that surround those issues.

And guess what? It’s the end of the quarter, so time to go through all of these.

He also looks at things like

Check-out his post HERE to review his list. 

Use Analytics as a Guide

Take a solid look at your Google Analytics in the context of reviewing where your website and web content is effective and where it isn’t?

Where do you lose people?

Where do they stay for a long time?

What is their most common journey to conversion?

Where do people convert most commonly from each different referral channel?

What are your most common exit pages?

Use your analytics as a guide to help provide clues about where your website is performing and where it’s failing.

This is also useful right now to see how people are engaging with your content differently due to our current, unusual situation?

For example, we check our analytics each week to plan what content we will write, push, republish, or share on our social channels, based on what people are showing us they are most interested in.

The great thing about analytics is you can keep doing this over and over again on both a macro and micro level.

People tell you what they need. You just have to look at the data.

Get Those Websites Clean

And there you have it. Step two in our business spring cleaning extravaganza: Your website performance. Set some time aside each day this week to go through one of these sections each day.

Not only will you clean-up your website and improve your website performance, but you’ll also learn a lot about your customer in the process.

What else would you add to this list?

About Laura Petrolino

Laura Petrolino is chief marketing officer for Spin Sucks, an integrated marketing communications firm that provides strategic counsel and professional development for in-house and agency communications teams. She is a weekly contributor for their award-winning blog of the same name. Spin Sucks. Join the Spin Sucks   community.

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