My Website Sucks. Should I Change It Now Or Later? Part 2
In part 1 of this article, I started my explanation on when is the best time to update your site. Here’s the continuation of the article.
- Analyze Your Website Content – And See Where You Stand
It’s not only about looks when it comes to refreshing a website. Your site must be considered current. Ensuring that what you are saying is valid, helpful, and readable to your visitors. So how can you determine whether your content is new, high-quality, and up-to-date?
By conducting a content audit.
A content audit is intended to assess which links get indexed by search engines, which need to be refreshed and no longer exist. Here are some basic steps you need to follow:
- Compile all your databases and sitemaps. The sitemap is a document that lists your site’s pages, videos, and other files along with their relationships. Data from your website is organized into your website’s internal database.
- Your site’s URLs are indexed by web crawlers who collect content throughout the Internet. An algorithm can be applied to web crawler data to find relevant links in response to specific search terms and keywords. We recommend using Google Analytic, Google Webmaster Tools, and Screaming Frog for crawling website content.
- Content auditing can go beyond essentials: You can use titles, descriptions, and word count as primary criteria for content auditing. All of your content entries should contain these elements.
- Check organic search, conversions, publish date, time-on-site, page views, load speed, and mobile-responsiveness, too.
- The number of conversions divided by unique visits is the conversion rate. By measuring this metric, you can determine if your website traffic is profitable.
- Time-on-site is pretty self-explanatory: it’s the amount of time your visitors spend on each of your pages. Content audits can benefit from this metric since you get a clear idea of the performance of your online content.
- A page-per-visit measurement indicates how much content is viewed per visit. In most cases, it is presented as an average, which is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors by the total number of page views.
- The slower your page loads, the fewer pages search engines can crawl, affecting your search engine rankings.
- Take a good thorough look at your content: Identity what content no longer reflects your current business and goals and delete it. Do you need to rewrite or update anything? Is there anything that needs some attention?
Note: It is essential to perform two separate content audits if your website has Desktop and Mobile versions as their codebases are different.
- Competitor Analysis
You should also examine how your competitors’ sites can be improved while evaluating the same areas where yours could be better. Are they doing anything new on their website that is working? Is their website more responsive than yours? Have they made updates to their website recently?
Aside from seeing what your competitors’ websites look like, it would help if you also figured out which websites link to them. Is it possible to obtain links from these same websites, or can you get links from other high-ranking websites? This is authority backlinking 101 & makes a huge impact on your rankings.
- Make Sure Applications Are Maintained
Now that you have updated your contact information, added some fresh content, and checked for broken links, make sure that all of your web apps are functioning properly. For your tech to keep pace with your business growth, it must adapt and grow along with it.
App management practices include testing and debugging software, enhancing technology and site functionality, updating and maintaining existing security protocols, maintaining new browser versions, creating and maintaining 3rd party integrations, and more. It is very important to maintain your website’s modules, code, plugins and integrations to avoid various issues.
Honorary Mention: A Mobile-Responsive Website
This one is obvious and goes without saying. But nobody is surprised when I say smartphones are the most popular way people access the web. And a lot of them never use anything other than their phone so to say mobile responsiveness is important would be an understatement.
Plus Google favors mobile web-optimized websites in its search rankings and penalizes those that aren’t.
In conclusion, keep it simple. Think marathon, not a race.
A website refresh can be as extensive as you want to make it… Just like any renovation. Although we’ve covered many small changes you can make to your website some will make a much bigger impact than others. But do not under-estimate the end result.
So what now? evaluate your needs and make a plan of attack – and then get started on it. There’s no time like right now.
