9 Web Design Housekeeping Tasks to Do in the New Year

Just like your car needs periodic tune-ups, your bike needs its chain tightened, and your home needs the front door entryway spruced up, your website needs attention from time to time.

The new year can be a great time to tune up your website. Business is often slower, employees become recharged after the holiday, and you are looking ahead. Additionally, you're thinking about ways to expand in the coming months and how your website can play a role in that expansion.

Whether you are doing the work yourself or working with a Chicago web design company like Digital Authority Partners, here are nine web design and website maintenance housekeeping tasks to put on your to-do list in the new year.

1. Keep A Modern Look and Feel to Your Website

Times change and your website should too. Like an outdated couch in your living room, a website with an old look sends a message to your customers and potential customers that you are behind the times. Ensure to regularly refresh your colors, fonts, imagery, videos, call-to-action-buttons, and more. Anything you need to do to make sure your business looks and feels relevant and competitive.

2. Make Sure The Information on Your Site is Current

Update information about your business, products, and services, and make sure that all of your contact information is up to date. It's a new year, and maybe it has been a while since you conducted a comprehensive update of your website. 

Run over each page in detail to catch any obsolete products, old taglines, name changes, service offerings, addresses, and more. Do you have new customer reviews to post? Is your contact information still the same? Have some of your vendors updated their logos or colors?

3. Review Your Analytics

Website traffic patterns changes as times change. Conduct an analysis of your website traffic and analytics to ensure the desired traffic numbers. Review that your bounce rate is low, that your on-page retention is high, and that you are getting the conversions you want. Not sure what to target, or are you seeing problems, but you're unsure how to solve them? A high-quality Chicago web design company like Digital Authority Partners can help out. 

4. Fine-tune All of Your Pages’ UX 

If you have changed any website elements due to the recommendations found above, make sure to fine-tune the user experience for each page. For example, make sure some elements have not moved below the fold, the text does not block icons, and first-time users can easily navigate your site.

5. Look for Broken or Outdated Links

Broken links hurt your search engine optimization and are a huge turn-off for visitors. Check every link on your site to ensure it goes where you want it to go. Web design companies have analysis tools that can instantly find broken links, including links that may not be easy to find from your homepage.

6. Test the Checkout Process 

Possibly the most essential part of your website if you sell a product or service online. Go into your checkout page, put something in your cart, and see the checkout process. Is it loading slowly? Are you unsure of included shipping or how much shipping will be? Do you have to click through too many pages to get to where you enter your credit card information? Each could highlight a big red flag that says your site needs help.

7. Check That Your Forms Are Still Working Correctly

Nobody likes filling out forms, especially forms that are slow to load, slow to submit, too detailed, too obscure, or simply not fun. Make sure that all of your forms work as they should and that anyone filling them out will get a positive impression of your company from using one.

8. Test Your Website on Multiple Devices 

You may have gotten used to your website performing well on your phone, tablet, or desktop computer. People may access your website from both the most advanced systems made today and devices that should be in museums. 

While you cannot test your site on every conceivable device, you can still test on several devices and operating systems. Look for images or graphics that won’t load, links that don’t work, text that runs across images, script errors, and other problems that may need to be corrected.

9. Check For Any Security Updates 

Your website host, the software used to create your website, and any apps you use on or run your website probably receive periodic security updates. Some will install and update themselves without you having to lift a finger (or even knowing that it took place). Others will need to be manually checked and, perhaps, manually updated. Use this time to peruse all of your primary software systems and operating systems and see which ones have security updates that you need to install. 

You may also at this time wish to update your passwords, update all of your system software, install a web application firewall, install SSL, and update all of your security prompts. Also, remember to back up your data and files regularly, if needed, by using an automatic backup service. 

If all of this sounds like a lot to take care of during your "downtime" at the beginning of the new year, take heart – there are experienced pros who will do it for you. Find a Chicago web design company like Digital Authority Partners. They can handle annual maintenance – or maintenance on demand if your issues demand immediate attention. You may find that periodic scheduled maintenance gives you peace of mind and better website performance. Digital Authority Partners can also arrange a website review, technical SEO analysis, and updates to your writing, calls to action, images, and videography.