As the year draws to a close, it’s a great opportunity to check in with your website and digital goals, and prepare for the new year. Assessing and improving your business website at the end of the year can help ensure that your online presence remains effective, up-to-date, and aligned with your goals. Let’s walk through a year-end website checklist to set up success in the New Year.
The Year-End Website Checklist for Success in the New Year
As you walk through this year-end website checklist, consider making a list of items you need to address. With a list of items, you can then prioritize these tasks and make a plan for addressing them. If these items seem overwhelming, remember that you don’t need address all of these items all at once. Making a list, prioritizing updates, and working on them, step-by-step, will improve your website in important ways.
1. Website Performance Evaluation
Your website’s performance plays a critical role in SEO, as well as your potential customers’ enjoyment of your website. This is a great time to take a closer look at your website’s performance, and make sure it’s up-to-par.
Analyze Website Analytics
Google Analytics provides a variety of insights to help you assess your site.
Take a look at your website analytics, including website traffic, user behavior, and conversion data from tools like Google Analytics. Identify trends, such as changes in traffic patterns or page views, and understand how users interact with your site. This can show weak points you might need to focus on, as well as strategies that have worked, that you might repeat.
Page Speed Testing
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to assess page loading speed. Slow-loading pages can lead to high bounce rates. Optimize images and minimize scripts to enhance page speed.
2. Content Audit
Your website content, including your text, images, videos, downloadables, and more, plays a big part in your business’s success online. Pay close attention to this item on your year-end website checklist, and see where you can improve your content to get your customers’ attention.
Content Quality Assessment
Evaluate the quality and relevance of your website’s content. Remove outdated or low-performing content and focus on creating fresh, valuable content that aligns with your target audience’s needs.
Keyword Analysis
Google Adwords and Keyword Planner can help you assess your keywords and find opportunities.
Review keyword performance and identify new keyword opportunities. Revisit your best-performing pages, and update them, so your competitor’s don’t take your top spots in a search engine results page (SERP). Optimize existing content with high-potential keywords and research new keyword opportunities that you can capitalize on in the near year.
3. Technical SEO Review
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays an essential role in your digital strategy. Without SEO, potential customers will have a hard time finding your site, which makes it difficult to capture traffic, leads, or sales online. Technical SEO is an important part of your overall SEO strategy, and addresses your website’s functionality and organization. This is an important item on your year-end website checklist, since it helps your website adhere to best practices, and keep from falling behind.
Crawl Your Website
Screaming Frog SEO spider will crawl your entire site, or subfolders, and give you important SEO information about each page.
Use SEO crawling tools, like Screaming Frog Spider, to identify technical issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors. Address these issues to enhance the site’s technical health.
Sitemap and Robots.txt
Ensure that your sitemap and robots.txt files are updated and optimized. These files provide search engines with guidance on crawling and indexing your site.
Mobile Compatibility
Confirm that your website is mobile-responsive and renders well on various devices and screen sizes. Mobile usability is crucial for user experience and SEO.
5. User Experience (UX)
When users enjoy your website and they can easily find what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to make purchases, download your lead magnets, or make an inquiry. Take some time to assess your user experience or UX, and solve problems that come up.
User Testing
Conduct user testing to gather feedback on the site’s usability. Understand how users navigate the site, identify pain points, and make improvements to enhance the overall user experience.
Gather Feedback
Request user feedback through surveys, forms, or customer service interactions. Use this input to make informed improvements.
A/B Testing
Conduct A/B testing on specific elements of your website, such as CTAs, landing pages, or forms, to identify which variations perform better.
6. SEO Strategy
There are many elements of SEO, including the previously mentioned technical elements. Your content and links also play an important part. Assessing your SEO strategy, including how well it worked this year, and what you can do differently this year, will help you stay competitive.
Backlink Profile
This toxic domain report from SEMrush shows risk of an SEO penalty, and recommends disavowing links for potential spam sites.
When other, high-quality websites link to yours, it’s like a vote of confidence from that site to yours. This is one factor that Google uses to decide how to rank sites in a SERP. Evaluate the quality and quantity of backlinks to your site. Identify opportunities for building high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources. Disavow links from spam websites that can bring the credibility of your website down.
Local SEO
If you have a physical location, optimize your website for local search. Ensure that your business information is accurate and consistent in online directories and local listings. Make sure that your business is listed in relevant directories. Take over your Google Business listing.
Review SEO and Marketing Strategies
Evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO and marketing efforts over the past year. This can help show what your strategy is missing, or what needs more attention. For example, if you have high traffic, but few leads, your content might not be attracting the right audience. Or, your calls-to-action (CTAs) or lead magnets might not be appealing. Or, if you’re getting lots of new customers, but your customers aren’t making repeat purchases, take a look at your engagement strategy, and how you’re incentivizing loyal customers.
7. Security and Updates
Web security evolves quickly, and it’s important to stay up-to-date. As you go through your year-end website checklist, spend some time making sure your website and data is secure.
SSL Certificate
Verify that your site is secure by having an SSL certificate installed. This not only improves security but also positively impacts SEO.
Data Backups
Regularly back up your website data, and ensure that you have a reliable backup system in place in case of data loss or security breaches. If bad actors try to lock down your site using techniques like ransomware, you can rely on your data backups to get your site going again, instead of being held hostage.
Content Management System (CMS)
Ensure that your CMS and all plugins or extensions are up-to-date. Regularly update software to improve security and performance. Often, when software developers find vulnerabilities, they issue updates to fix them. If your software isn’t up-to-date, bad actors may be able to take advantage of known vulnerabilities.
8. Goal Assessment
Your goals can help you assess how well your strategies are working, and what direction you’re heading. This item on your year-end website checklist shouldn’t be overlooked, or you can easily lose sight of your overall mission.
Review Previous Goals
What goals did you set over the last 12 months? Did you reach these goals, or get close? If not, do you know what went wrong? Consider your digital marketing goals, and how these align with your overall business goals.
Set New Goals
Consider if you want to continue reaching your previous goals, or set new goals this year. Remember to set measurable goals that are challenging, but attainable. Make sure that team members who are involved in these goals are aware of them, and have tools to monitor their progress, and reach these goals.
9. E-commerce Considerations
Daily Harvest taps into their target market for the style and design of this product landing page template.
If you’re selling products online, take some time at the end of the year to see how well your e-commerce strategies and marketplace are working.
Inventory and Pricing Updates
Review your product inventory and pricing. Ensure that all product details and prices are current. Consider how you might use testimonials on your product pages to encourage more sales and overcome customers’ doubts.
Shipping and Promotions
Review and update shipping options, promotions, and discount offers, especially if they vary during the holiday season.
10. Accessibility and Compliance
Great websites are easy for all customers to navigate, including those with low vision, limited dexterity, or those that may use uncommon tools to navigate the web, like screen readers. A few simple checks and online tools can help you make sure your website is enjoyable for everyone to use. Furthermore, your website should be safe and trustworthy, so you don’t land in legal hot water.
Accessibility Check
Use online tools to check your website’s accessibility. These tools can also help you assess whether your site is in compliance with accessibility standards, like WCAG. Many of the factors affecting accessibility can be easily fixed, such as adequate color contrast or image alt-text.
Privacy and Legal Compliance
Ensure your website complies with updated data protection regulations and legal requirements relevant to your industry or location. If your site isn’t in compliance with laws like the General Data Protection Regulation or the GDPR, put this on your to-do list for this year. Data protection laws are only going to get stricter, and compliance with the most recent regulations can help you stay prepared.
12. Marketing and Social Media Integration
Digital marketing and social media are important to reach new customers and close more leads and sales. This year, consider what’s worked and what hasn’t, and how you can update your strategy to take on the latest platforms and changes.
Social Media Audit
What platforms are you currently using? Who is responsible for creating content, and how are they determining what content they create? Conduct a social media audit to assess your current strategy, and see how it aligns with your goals.
Social Media Updates
Integrate social media accounts and ensure that your social media profiles are aligned with your website’s branding, as well as your customer’ preferences. Consider how you can use social media to connect with new customers, and craft a social media strategy for the upcoming year.
13. Budgeting and Planning
The last item on the year-end website checklist may be the most important. However, budgeting and planning for next year requires assessing many of the previous factors first, so you know what you’re working with, and what problems you might need to address.
Assess Resources
Evaluate your budget, team, and resources for website maintenance and improvement in the upcoming year. Plan for investments in design, development, content, and marketing.
Make a Plan
As you’ve gone through this year-end website checklist, you may have created a list of things you need to address. Organize this list in order of importance, and outline a plan for attacking these items. Consider your timeline, and any expertise or additional resources you may need to take on your list.
By following these steps and implementing necessary improvements, you can keep your website optimized, user-friendly, and aligned with your business goals for the coming year. Website maintenance is an ongoing process, and regular assessments ensure your online presence remains competitive and effective. If you’ve made a list of improvements, but you’re not sure how to attack your list items, contact us. Our digital marketing, design, and programming experts can help you update and optimize your website and marketing strategy.