New Year Website Makeover: Tips on Refreshing Your Website

Welcome to a new year and the best time to give your website a makeover. The busy holiday season is over and it's time to revisit the design, function and content on your website, looking for areas that require some improvement. Whether a full redesign or a change of template, some SEO and new content, our tips on refreshing your website are just what you need.

Tips for Giving Your Website a Makeover 

With traditionally low traffic in January, now is the best time to give your website a makeover. We've made a list of suggestions of things you could consider reviewing and updating, along with new things you could add to your website.

• Contact details - very quick and simple thing to do, but often overlooked. Double check that your contact details displayed on your website are accurate, and also test that any completed forms on your site are delivered to your best email address. 
• Refresh your images - does your web banner still represent where your business is? Do you have any updated images you could swap with older ones on your site? Are there images which have a too big file size which need reducing? 
• Colours and fonts - does your website colour scheme need adjusting to meet your brand guidelines? Are your headings, buttons and calls to action easily differentiated by colour and font/size? 
• Forms - test complete all of your website forms to make sure they are still working as expected, both from the business and customer point of views.
• Email subscription - is your lead magnet still appropriate to capture new email subscription members? Do you need to update your subscription CTA wording? Does the CTA itself need to be positioned somewhere different within the website? Are collected emails being organised in the correct member group?
• Social media accounts - if you haven't already, add links to your social media accounts. If you already have done, check that the links still work correctly.
• About page - does your About page need updating with new staff details or services/types of products your business offers?
• Blogs - do you have a dedicated blog page? Are you adding new blogs regularly? Do any of your current articles need updating or revising?
• Service pages - take the time to check that your service pages are correct and update if required. If you no longer offer a service, make sure that you redirect that page URL to a relevant option.
• Product pages - have you new products you need to add or old ones to remove? Are the product descriptions and prices still accurate? Can you add any new product photos? Make sure to redirect no longer selling product pages to a new relevant product.
• SEO - are your meta tags all completed? Check that your current keywords still the best choice by redoing your keyword research. Are you using your keywords in headings, filenames, and page content? 
• Evaluate user experience - put yourself in the shoes of your website visitor and check the UX of your website. Is the navigation intuitive? Can you find information easily? Do you need to make changes to the UX? 
• Website template - are you still happy with your website template, or would you like to try out another? If you do want to make a swap over, be certain to save your current website template design first, so you can revert back to it if required.