As a website designer, I understand the importance of keeping your online presence fresh and functional. Just like your home, your website needs periodic maintenance and updates to ensure it’s operating at its best. With spring upon us, now is the perfect time to tackle those overdue website projects and give your digital space the attention it deserves.
Here are some essential steps to guide you through the process of spring cleaning your website:
- Update passwords: It’s a great idea to update your passwords from time to time and changing your weak, overused passwords to a strong and secure password limits your chances of getting hacked. Also storing your passwords in a password vault, such as Bitwarden Password Manager, is highly recommended to keep your passwords safe.
- Clean up & update users and permissions: View your users and permission and make sure that only those that need access to your site are listed, and limit access, only giving admin access when necessary.
- Stay up-to-date: Regular updates to all of your software and plugins not only enhances performance but also addresses security vulnerabilities. Take the time to download the latest versions to keep your website secure and running smoothly.
- Delete any unused themes and plugins: Outdated plugins and themes pose security risks, allowing hackers to access your website, even if they’re deactivated. To reduce the risk of breaches, delete any unused plugins and themes.
- Conduct a content audit: A thorough content audit can provide valuable insights to guide your content strategy.
- Update your messaging: Your business has evolved, and so should your website. Evaluate your website’s content to identify if your messaging needs to be updated and if your services or offerings are out of date.
- Proofread thoroughly: Even the most meticulously crafted websites can contain typos or errors. Take the time to proofread every page of your website to ensure it’s free of embarrassing mistakes that could deter visitors.
- Refresh your imagery: Does your website include a picture of yourself that, as one of my clients said recently, “is no longer honest”? Update it to one that’s more recent, professional branding photos are always a good choice for your website if you can get them done. Having imagery that reflects your message is important.
- Optimize and compress images: Having large, high-resolution images on your site can significantly slow down its loading speed. To optimize page load times and boost your sites performance, be sure to utilize image compression and leverage modern image formats like WebP for optimal results.
- Check your blog and client assets: Determine your top-performing topics, gaps in content that may be of interest to your audience, and opportunities for updating or repurposing existing content.
- Hunt down broken links: Broken links can frustrate visitors and harm your website’s credibility. Use a free broken link checker to locate any broken links on your site and promptly fix them to improve user experience.
- Optimize for mobile: With mobile usage on the rise, it’s crucial to ensure your website looks and functions flawlessly on smartphones and tablets. Test each page on various mobile devices to ensure a seamless user experience.
- Explore Internal Linking: Internal linking not only improves navigation but also boosts your website’s SEO. Look for opportunities to link to newer content from older pages to enhance your website’s search engine visibility.
- Clean out your website’s database: To optimize your website’s functionality, its overall health and speed can be affected by your WordPress database.
- Test your site speed: There are many factors that can slow a website down over time. Testing website speed is crucial for ensuring a good user experience and optimizing performance. There are several free online speed testing tools you can use to test and get strategies to optimize website speed such as Pingdom, GTMetrix, and PageSpeed Insights to name a few.
By following these steps, you’ll not only give your website a much-needed refresh but also enhance its functionality and effectiveness. Just like a thorough spring cleaning leaves your home feeling fresh and revitalized, your website will be clean as a whistle and ready to impress its visitors.
