Spring is in the air and its that time of the year to start clearing out the clutter of things that have filled up those little spaces over winter and time gone by. With spring comes the traditional routine of spring cleaning the home, the car, and around the office. Though, many people tend to forget about their website when it comes to the tradition of spring cleaning. Have you thought about the last time you spring clean your WordPress website?
Is it time for you to Spring Clean your WordPress Website?
When was the last time that you did a spring cleaning of your business website? Has it been days? Months? Or even years since the last time you have made updates or changed anything on your website?
If is has been awhile since the last time you updated your website, or you don’t even know how long it even may of been since the last time that you made some changes, you may be long overdue to Spring Clean your WordPress Website.
Here are a few good reasons to Spring Clean Your WordPress Website:
- Performing a fresh backup of your website will preserve what you have in case anything is ever lost, hacked, or modified, giving you a recovery to go back to.
- A spring clean your WordPress website will speed up your website. Making it load faster on mobile devices. Most people will leave a website.
- Gives your website a fresh new look that recaptures your customer’s attention and brings more in. When you spring clean your WordPress website it will make users take notice of the changes and action that will reinvigorate your website.
- Updating old content will add a fresh new experience for your brand. While giving users something new to read and share with others. Having fresh new content will also help boost your website SEO.
- Adding new content to your website to reflect the changes that have happened in your business since it was updated last. Have you added new products, services, and options for your business? Your website needs to work in unison with your marketing and sales department, not as an independent department. If you don’t have a blog, consider adding on to keep your customer updated, while adding fresh new content.
- Check and update your SEO on each of your web pages and blogs. Do you have these in place? Are they missing? Adding on-page SEO will greatly help in the ranking with Google and Search Engines.
- Updating your theme and WordPress core will make a huge difference in a wide variety of areas. From speeding up your site to adding new functions and features to your existing website, prevents hacking becomes more mobile-friendly and much more.
- Test contact forms, widgets, and plugins. Ensure that everything is in working order. If they are not working, they will need to be fixed or replaced. It’s never good when a contact form doesn’t work and a potential customer is trying to reach you.
- Updating and removing plugins will increase your website security, and boost performance for you and your users. When website plugins haven’t been updated for a long period of time they become vulnerable. According to Wordfence, plugin vulnerabilities represented 55.9% of the known entry points for hackers.
- Conhttps://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/03/attackers-gain-access-wordpress-sites/sider adding a security system to protect yourself and your users from hacks and attacks online by limiting login attempts, blocking IP addresses, and settings restrictions. I love to use Wordfence and its free to use.
- You need to be mobile friendly and responsive. If your website is so outdated that it is not responsive and does not work well on mobile devices, you are missing out on a huge market to sell your products and services. As over 174 million U.S. consumers (72+%) own smartphones and 93 million (38+%) now own tablets, and 70% of online transactions occur on a mobile device. [1] [2]
- Test your navigation and go to your site ensuring that everything is working properly. It can be very frustrating for customers who cannot find what they are looking for or be ending up on a dead end with nowhere to go.
- Find and replace Broken Links or remove them completely. When customers are engaged in your website content, it can be very embarrassing when none of your links are working due to wrong URLs or the website that you are linking to updates theirs and yours do not reflect those changes.
- Find and fix 404 errors these errors are returned when a browser or bot goes looking for a page and is unable to find it. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing from Google’s perspective, it does present a poor user experience, especially if someone has clicked on a link from within your site expecting to be directed to some specific information.
- Measure your website speed your website loading speed is a significant ranking factor for Google. That’s because they want any search results they return to provide a positive user experience. Make sure you visit Google PageSpeed Insights every now and then to check on your results.
Though there are a few things of spring that are more satisfying and fun than to spring clean your WordPress website. For many people, however, the pleasure comes only after the work is complete and clean to make room for things anew. While the benefits to spring clean your WordPress website can boost your website speed, increase your web presence and grow your website potential.
Is it time for you to spring clean your WordPress website?
Do you have any lingering web projects that need to be completed?
Are you ready to start tackling those long overdue projects that have been sitting on the back burner?
If so, please feel free to contact us and we can get something started.
Also, do you know anyone who is need of a website?
We are having a “Spring-into-Action” special going on where we are giving away a $100 gift card for each new web referral. If you refer anyone that is in need of a website or hosting for a new or existing website and they hire us to do the job, you will receive a $100 gift card to a place of your choice.
We hope you have a wonderful day and enjoy the beautiful spring weather ahead of us.
Let us know if there is anything we can do to help your business grow.
References:
[1] 10 Useful Customer Experience Statistics For Your 2015 Strategy, Neosperience
[2] 15 Retailer Resources, Stats and Tactics, SnapRetail
