5 TIPS ON HOW TO PREPARE YOUR website FOR THE NEW YEAR
Not sure how to begin refreshing your website for the new year? We have five exciting recommendations on how to prepare your website for the New Year for you to consider. Have no fear, a completely new web design for your site is not necessary.
Finding the time to consistently do website maintenance is a year-round challenge for many small companies. Potential clients are quickly turned off by out-of-date plugins, abandoned blogs, and an otherwise archaic design. Don’t worry, cleaning up your website and making the required upgrades in preparation for the new year may be a fun project to work on in December and January.
Here are our top 5 tips on getting your website ready for the New Year:
Plugins
One of the first things you should do is ensure that WordPress and all of your plugins are up to date. If you haven’t updated your website’s infrastructure in a while, now is the time to do so. WordPress and its add-ons get regular upgrades that include new features and security fixes. Maintaining an up-to-date installation reduces the risk of discovering a security flaw or a harmful plugin.
Update content
You should review the content of each page of your website to confirm its continued usefulness. It’s easy to put off updating your website’s content until it’s too late and you’re still advertising products and pricing from two years ago. Prevent it from happening.
Review Performance
Assessing how effective your website is is still another factor to think about. It’s crucial to keep an eye on your website’s analytics monthly, but doing so towards the end of the year is extremely crucial. You can better promote your website if you have a clear understanding of what methods are producing results, how people are finding your site, and which pages are most often visited. Without this data, you may assume that ads on social media platforms like Facebook or search engines like Google are your website’s most important drivers of traffic. You’ll have a wealth of data at your fingertips about your website’s performance now that Google Analytics and Search Console are linked.
Check security
The security of your website is your duty, and you must not shirk it. Just a few minutes to update might save you from major headaches and the risk of being hacked. Maintain database and file backups in case of disaster. Use a plugin like BackupBuddy or UpdraftPlus to automate the procedure. If you’re not currently using an SSL certificate, you should implement Let’s Encrypt SSL. It is a standard part of website security, and many hosts provide it at no cost. You should use a security plugin like iThemes or Wordfence, and regularly change the passwords for your website and admin accounts.
SEO strategy
You need an SEO plan to help people find your website when they search for it. It’s vital to know how web design affects SEO and how SEO helps your business. You’ll also need an SEO strategy and since SEO is a dynamic field, regular analysis and adjustments to your tactics. You may do this by improving your local SEO, optimising your sites for speed, and adding meta titles and descriptions to your web pages.
Conclusion
To conclude on how to prepare your website for the New Year. Check and mend any problems with the website. Everyone makes mistakes, it’s just part of being human. By setting up 301 redirects with a plugin like “Redirection,” you may restore functionality to links that had previously led to content that has since been removed. Customers seeing an issue on your website is not the end of the world, but it is undesirable.
