Your website is a living, breathing thing that exists to help tell the story of your brand.
To do that, it needs several things:
- Content to help the site thrive and grow.
- A design that breeds creativity and promotes ease of use.
- A call to action or some type of opt-in that entices users to want to engage with your brand.
Back That Thing Up
You’ve put so much time and effort into your website, it would be a colossal shame if you somehow lost all that data because you didn’t have a proper backup plan in place.
According to Small Business Trends, 58 percent of small businesses are not prepared for a data loss. Backing up your website is the ultimate insurance policy against loss of data, hackers, human error and much more.
You should strive to create a full backup of your website at least once a week, and run a manual backup before performing any major updates.
It’s That Time of the Month … to Audit
Every time you add fresh content or update something on your website, there’s a chance you could also be adding broken links, missing files, page errors, malfunctioning images, missing alt tags, etc. All of these things wreak havoc on your site’s SEO.
Running monthly site audits is a great practice to ensure your website looks good, performs at optimal levels and stands the best chance of ranking high in search engine listings.
Don’t Hate, Communicate
As I said earlier, your website must have some way for visitors to engage with your brand. For many sites, the most effective method to build connections and encourage communication is through a simple contact form.
It’s a good idea to check your contact forms every few weeks to make sure they are working properly, collecting the data you need and that they’re correctly connecting to the designated email address.
86 the 404s
Google Search Console is an easy-to-use (and free) tool that ensures Google can find and crawl each page of your site, as well as show you which sites are linking to your website. You can also create alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam or other issues on your site.
One of the biggest killers of website traffic is the dreaded 404 error. Visitors to your site will receive a 404 error if they try to access a broken or dead link, which is bad, because errors like these often lead to a bounce. And that bounce could have led to a sale or new customer. Google Search Console can help you avoid these errors altogether.
It’s never a bad idea to dedicate some time to the health and wellness of your website. Your brand will thank you for it.
Cindy Baker, Brand825’s co-founder and chief creative officer, has been spitting creative fire for more than 25 years. She has created visual solutions that drive business strategies for Mercedes-Benz, Comdata and Asurion, to name a few. When she’s not building websites or designing unforgettable logos, Cindy can be found enjoying life on a motorcycle.
