Websites are the virtual front doors to businesses, organizations, and information, so ensuring accessibility is a moral and strategic necessity. Web accessibility, often overlooked, is the practice of developing websites that can be used and navigated by all individuals, including those with disabilities.
Read MoreIf you run a business, your website is probably a big part of it. You may use it to sell products and advertise services or to communicate with your customers and clients, and attract a wider audience. Websites are crucial to modern business, and many operate solely online. If you make money from a blog or e-commerce store, your site might be all of your business, and looking after it may be a full-time job.
Running a website can be tough. You might spend a lot of your time creating content, taking photos, replying to comments or emails, and advertising and sharing your work. You might not always have the time to deal with all of those smaller, behind the scenes tasks. Unfortunately, without committing time to these back of house jobs, your website or blog will never be as good as it should be. Many seem like smaller jobs, but failing to give them time might be holding you back and stopping you from reaching your full potential.
However, thanks to a global pandemic, a lot of us suddenly have a lot more free time, or time stuck at home than we are used to. It could be the perfect time to get stuck into some tasks, which will both keep you busy and improve your website.
Delete Some Old Posts
Running a website, whether it’s a blog or your business, is a steep learning curve. Most of us learn as we go, and it’s common to look back at early content and cringe.
Some of these older posts and pages will be salvageable. You’ll be able to update them, add new information, improve your writing, and insert photos and videos. Others are best just letting go of.
Poor quality content or old, outdated posts bring your site down. They can stop you from being found online and hinder your reputation. So, work through your old posts. Improve where possible and delete any that aren’t worth your time.
If you are currently stuck at home, you may not be able to take photos as freely as you’d like. But, there’s plenty that you can create in your house and garden, and if you look vastly different from any photos of yourself on your site, you could update them. Adding high-quality stock photos can also be a good idea if you have posts that are heavy on text, or with very low-quality images.
SEO is crucial when it comes to getting found by search engines. Good SEO means high placement on SERPS. This doesn’t just increase traffic; it also improves your reputation, boosts conversion, and helps you to become an authority in your field.
But SEO is hard work. It takes a big commitment, and the rules change all of the time, as search engines grow and develop and algorithms change. Get the best SEO services to help if you are struggling or don’t have the time to commit long-term. It can be well worth your while.
When was the last time that you checked your site for broken links? You might think that there’s no need, but broken links can affect your SEO, and they are more common than you might think. Every time someone has left a web address in a comment, and then let their site go, a dead link has been created. You may have created many yourself by deleting content or changing URLs. Spend this time searching for broken links, fixing them where you can, or removing them if you can’t.
If this process has a significant impact on your internal linking strategy, you may also want to look for orphaned posts and add new internal links where necessary.
You might give your stats a cursory glance every now and then, but do you ever make time to study your analytics? Do you look at your demographics? Do you know where your audience comes from, or what their interests are? Are the people visiting your site the people that you are writing for, or do you need to rethink your target audience?
Spend some time learning as much as you can about your viewers and customers. This can give you a fantastic opportunity to create significantly more effective marketing campaigns in the future.
As a small business or blogger, it’s tempting to follow people on social media in the hope that they will follow you back and help you to build a presence. This can work, but it can also mean that you are following countless accounts that bring nothing to your business. Take the time to clean up your feeds, getting rid of dead accounts. This will give you more time to engage with your loyal customers.
Branding has trends, just like anything else. Color schemes become more popular, or they start to look tired and dated. Minimalism is in one day, retro the next. Broadly speaking, if you want to design something that will last, it’s best to avoid trends and be true to your business and its message.
But, that doesn’t mean that it won’t need tweaking occasionally. If your branding is dated, or it no longer speaks for your company or to your audience, make some changes and give your customers time to get used to them before things start to pick up again.
There are plugins for almost everything nowadays. Some are very helpful. They can give you far more control over your site and add functionality. But, we often get drawn in to installing far too many and leaving old, broken, or no longer used plugins on our website. This can be a security risk and slow your site down. Try to condense your plugins by using those with more than one function, and make sure you delete anything that you no longer use or need.
You may have added a profile to your social media feeds and an about me page to your site when you first set it up, but have you updated it since? This is a great time to update images and info on all of your channels.
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