Just like your home, your small business website also needs an annual spring-cleaning. It’s very easy to let things slide, and the results of that could be a steady decline in traffic, reputation and consequently sales. This can be a relatively insidious way for you to lose traction with your website, as you don’t necessarily see it occurring. But it’s quite real, and will have very real results.
So in the spirit of prevention, here are 5 ways you can make a positive change in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper.
- Are your pages loading quickly? – It’s been said you have less than 10 seconds to load your page or the majority of people will abandon and head for faster, greener pastures. If your site is image heavy, and packed with flash, you may well need to optimize for faster performance. Moreover, Google will penalize your site in the search rankings should your pages load too slowly.
- Old products, programs, links lurking – Make sure you remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer relevant. Nothing helps say your page is stale and dated more than your PDF download from 2008 that’s not only dated but unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages don’t help your search rankings, either.
- Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer relevant content and images. Your old pictures from the company picnic in 2007 might not be considered fresh content, which is what folks and search engines both want!
- Social media – Be sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up-to-date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that might not be displayed with your social buttons.
- Fresh content – Nothing will help as much as fresh, updated content, in the form of posts, videos, audios, and images. If you have posts on the first page of your blog that are much older than a month, you might want to rethink your content strategy.
Break out your virtual broom and start sweeping. Your visitors will thank you! If you need a hand with a website refresher or if it’s time to upgrade your website completely we’d love to help you. Check out our website gallery and with more than 4.8 billion cell phone uses on the planet it might be time to consider a mobile responsive website that looks great on any device.
