Updating your website for 2021
The new year is the perfect time to look at your website. Whilst you work on your website every day, it’s good to take an extra bit of time to look at your website design and see what it needs.
At first, you need to ensure that everything is up to date on your website and is functioning correctly. You could also have a look at what primary keywords that your site targets and make some changes.
Make sure that your site is fully functional and up to date
The first thing you will want to do on the backend of your website is to check if it is working properly, no matter how big or small it is. This means conducting a thorough audit of your site and going through each page if possible.
You will need to check;
- Plugins or themes that need to be updated.
- Missing and poor-quality images.
- Incorrect and outdated user information.
- Broken links (you can fix this using a plugin).
- Broken features and plugins.
- Formatting and style issues.
- Missing and out-of-date content.
This is a lot to go through, but every page must make a strong impression. Whilst doing this, it is a good idea to have a look to see if your content is adequately organised. Make sure you make a backup before making any changes.
Perform A/B testing
After you have checked that everything is up to date, you need to see if your site is as useful as it could be. A/B testing is one of the best ways to do this. A/B testing merely is creating two versions of something and then testing them against each other.
For example, you might want people visiting your home page to sign up for an email list. You could then create two versions of the same page with a different type of call to action. You could have visitors randomly sent to one page or the other and track which gets the most clicks.
Get feedback
Along with performing your own testing, you will want to find out what your existing audience thinks of your site. When you have spent a lot of time looking at the front and back of your site, you can forget what it feels like to use your site as a new user. So it’s a good idea to solicit direct feedback from your regular visitors to help you update your website.
Research on your competitors
It is easy to spend so much time and effort on your site that you lose track of what your competitors are doing. This is the perfect time to see what your competitors are doing. Some tools can help you to conduct this, and most are focused on helping you compare your site to others via specific metrics.
For example, SimilarWeb displays traffic information for any site, and BuzzSumo lets you see which pieces of your competitors’ content were the most successful. You can also check out Ahrefs, which provides details on exactly what you need to do to outrank similar companies.
