Spring Cleaning for Your Website
The first hint of spring is in the air and I am in full “clean-out mode”.
I know. You’re like, “Wait, I have to clean my website?”
For SEO and good user experiences, yes, we should take the time to periodically (maybe every three months or at the very least once a year) do the following:
Website Spring Cleaning Checklist
☐ Check your site for broken links.
One thing that can really damage your SEO is having “broken” links. A broken link is basically what it sounds like-when you click on it doesn’t take you where it’s supposed to. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but suffice it to say it’s no good.
And the other reason to check your links if you are linking to external sites is that you never know if domain names have changed or even changed hands.
You can manually check links, but if you have a big website, or you just want to save some time, you can use this free broken link checker from Ahrefs.
☐ Update your copyright date to the correct year.
Yeah, it might be March, but it’s never too late to have the right copyright date! What’s the copyright date? At the bottom of most websites, you’ll see something like this:
© 2023 Company Name, LLC. All rights reserved.
Under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed in 1998, once you publish original content on your website it is considered protected. In some situations, you may take an extra step to get trademarks or additional copyrights for added protection, but the DMCA provides blanket coverage so that your original work cannot be plagiarized.
You can actually very simply install a line of code into the footer of your website so that it automatically updates each year! How cool is that? Here is the tutorial from Inside the Square on how to do that.
☐ Ensure your contact info is correct.
It’s possible that things could have changed in your practice, so make sure your email, phone, and address are all up to date anywhere they are listed (remember they could be listed in multiple places on your site, like both your contact page and your footer for example).
☐ Tweak the content (so Google knows your site is alive).
By making slight adjustments you can actually signal to Google that your website is active and this will help you rank higher. You can do things like swap out photos (just make sure to also adjust your image alt-text). Or you can make slight updates to the writing. If you have a blog one cool thing to consider is that instead of always writing new posts, you can actually update old ones and Google will consider them new!
☐ Do a quick scan to make sure it’s looking good on desktop and mobile.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it!) the internet is always changing. Platforms and browsers get updated, and things don’t stay static (even if your web developer used the best practices). Squarespace recently went through a massive (and awesome) update and that did affect codes on some of my sites made in the previous version. These were all easy fixes, but it has taken my clients being diligent in checking their sites and letting me know if anything looks amiss!
