Top 5 tips to refresh your website

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In the same way that you should change your smoke alarm battery each season, it's a good idea to check your website to make sure it is continuing to be the lead generation and sales tool it is designed to be.

Here is a list of our top recommendations:

Check that your forms are working Check for broken links Read it with fresh eyes to see if the content is up to date Do a content audit together and while you're at it ... Keep an eye on new internal linking opportunities (you'll see why below)

Check that your forms are working

It's easy to assume that the forms on your website (contact forms, opt-in forms, checkout forms) will continue to work forever.

It would be great if that were the case but in our experience, many things can change. That will be the topic of another post, but in the meantime, here is what you need to do...

Fill out your forms as you would expect a client to, with a different email address to your normal one. What should happen is that you receive a notification that a form has been filled in on your website, and also your client (in this case you) should receive a message confirming that you have received their message.

If one of those things does not happen - get your web support person to take a look at what has gone wrong and fix it.

Given that forms on your website are a key source of capturing leads, it is one of the most critical checks you should do regularly.

Check for broken links

Run your website through a broken link checker - there are lots of free ones around (like brokenlinkcheck.com or deadlinkchecker.com) and they are a good way to double-check the status of your links. Give this a whirl, or alternatively, sift through each page on your site and click on the links to make sure your visitors arrive safely at their site destination.

Give it a proofread

It's amazing how many websites have at least one typo - ask a friend to give yours a quick proofread for grammatical and spelling errors and even outdated language.

Confirm your pages look good on mobile

If you have been adding content to your website, it may be that things have started to become unaligned, and aren't easy to view on your tablet or mobile.

Look through all of your website pages - try using https://app.markup.io - an amazing tool that allows you to scroll through your website pages and view them in website, tablet, or mobile format. You can even leave yourself notes on each page for when you are ready to return and make the changes.

Content audit

I know it sounds obvious, but it's surprising how fast things change, and it's always a good idea to check your website for basic content updates.

Are all your products or services still on offer? Is everyone on your team page still working with you? And have any of your contact details changed? Are there any blog articles that are redundant?

The second thing is to check your analytics to see which pages on your website the traffic is going - and spend time making those pages better.

Look back to see what has worked and what could be improved. This can provide you with valuable information to fuel your content strategy.

Look for new internal linking opportunities

There may be opportunities to link to newer content from your old content.

What does this mean exactly?

It is good practice to link between pages on your website - it creates an interactive experience. For example, I can be talking about a range of websites we have developed and suggest you look at the portfolio page. The word 'portfolio' then links to the portfolio page.

This is good both for the reader's experience and SEO (ie. Google likes it). What's not to love about that!!

Implementation Tip

Set aside a whole morning or afternoon, or you can set one task a week