It’s officially Spring! With this time of year comes an inexplicable desire to start cleaning up, clearing out, and starting fresh. Why limit that to just the real world?

Now is the perfect time to Spring clean your own online presence and make sure it is refreshed, updated, and fully optimized so you can keep doing whatever it is you do best! Just as you were taught to change the oil and filter in your car every few thousand miles, the same logic should be applied to your website.

At Seriously Creative, we run into various websites that are missing key elements of a website suited to perform well and deliver successful results. There are simple steps you can take to ensure your website maintains its attractiveness and ability to perform well online, and we’re here to share a few of our favorites with you!

Website Updates

Your content management system

Making sure your CMS is updated and protected from viruses can be a vital step to ensuring a clean and accessible website. Not only should you be updating your CMS as needed, but you should also be testing it out after the update to make sure everything is running as expected, and don’t forget the plugins! There is always the possibility that an update may create conflicts with your current website – just another reason we’re here to help!

To clear up your CMS, make sure it’s fully updated, that you’ve removed any unwanted or unnecessary plugins, and that the full site is functioning securely. Along with making updates to your CMS, you should a make sure your Copyright years are up to date as well, including your domain name, graphics, and images on your website!

Your blog

If you manage a blog on your website, now is the perfect time to go in and make refreshments and updates to your content.

If you’ve kept up with search engine optimization updates, you should make any necessary changes to your content to ensure you are fully optimized, including removing any broken links.

Along with ensuring your blog writing content is optimized, take some time to look at each photo you are using on your website and ensure it is also fully optimized. One of the most common causes for a slow website are images that are not optimized. Take a look at your image tag and format, and consider doing what is needed to reduce

Your contact information

You’d be surprised how many businesses’ simply assume their contact info – including their location – are correct on their website and associated platforms without actually checking to be sure! As part of your clean, you should do more often than twice a year is to make sure all of your contact and company information is correct and functional.

Ensure your email, phone number, and location are all correct, as well as update any company information that has changed throughout the year. You may have new employees, or offer new services, or maybe you need to remove some outdated information. This will keep your website user-friendly and encourage visitors to take action.

And lastly… make it mobile-friendly!

Having a responsive, mobile-friendly site is absolutely necessary in today’s world of on-the-go web users. While you may not think it’s as important as the other notes we’ve made, this is probably the biggest update you can make to your website to ensure it is fully optimized, up to date, attracting users, and staying secure.

An excellent App we recommend to anyone looking to optimize their website for mobile devices is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test App – all you have to do is enter your URL and the app will tell you whether or not your website passes the mobile-friendly test.

While you’re performing these Spring cleaning exercises to your website, always keep in mind what your brand is and how you’d like that to be portrayed to the world. By keeping a close eye on design & content specific to your brand, your website will be light years ahead of the average website for businesses.

To sum it up

Performing all these tasks only once a year would be far too much work – even our expert team would have their heads spinning  Don’t neglect your site after the clean! Keeping it fresh and updated keeps you optimized and performing better than your competitors. Incorporating these routines into a weekly or monthly routine helps keep things running smoothly. By implementing these simple clean-up steps, you’ll be able to see what is working and what isn’t, and how to maintain a well-performing, attractive website!