You know your WordPress website is a living thing, right?
It’s not some boring static HTML site or multiple block construction website platform that promises more that can deliver.
Your WordPress site does not breathe but dynamically lives on the Internet available to the world.
Just like a human being, it needs some attention, healthcare, and love.
The problem is we almost forget our health due to crazy day to day work, family duties, problems that require immediate attention. So how to remember to scan our website health from time to time?
That’s what we’ll tell you in the fallowing lines.
Set a timetable to avoid forgetting
Use Google Calendar, a paper planner, what it’s best for you, to set a calendar frame to check up your site.
You should do it, at least, every six months. Perhaps around mid-January and mid-June, just to have a frame easy to remember, like beginning and middle of the year.
But you can choose what is better for your case. Maybe you have a seasonal peak of visitors during a particular period of the year. In that case, it’s better to have that check up at least two months prior the traffic spike.
With your timetable set, let’s move on to the next step: the checklist.
Create a checklist to avoid wasting time
Do you know what’s worse than losing money? It’s waste time.
A checklist prevents you from wandering around, half lost, thinking about the next task to accomplish.
Just like your site, the checklist it’s a living thing. So, it’s OK to move a task, write new ones, delete some that aren’t necessary. Adjust to your needs.
The following are some essential items you should have on your checklist.
However, you’re free to copy those elements or make the necessary adjustments to your business. But, please, have a checklist.
SEO check and improvement
Dive in the posts, pages, and products (if you have an e-commerce store) SEO information.
Verify your snippet’s copy, ensure you have all the meta descriptions in all of them. Eventually, make some adjustments on headings. Yoast SEO is a great plugin that can help you in that task if you use it.
If you haven’t been doing SEO verification regularly, the beginning can be a quite painful. But you have to start sometime, so it’s better now than later. Remember that will be easier in the future.
However, don’t go SEO crazy. Run away from excess.
Organize your blog with an audit
I sincerely hope you have a blog on your site. If not, it’s time to get started.
A blog is a powerful tool to create useful content for your customers, potential customers or users. It’s important to establish your brand as an authority in your market.
If you already have a blog, congratulations.
Enter in every post you’ve made in the last six months, after the previous check up, and read them.
- Make some little changes if applicable;
- Break long pieces of sentences in more paragraphs;
- Verify if you have lots of headings in long posts;
- Change headings copy if necessary;
- Add more content or remove some;
- Just don’t modify the slug.
Google loves the new content on older posts. Don’t be afraid of doing it when necessary.
When in that task, make an audit of posts subject and try to figure out new content ideas. See the many ways you’ve written about the same topic if it was in a positive, negative or neutral tone.
Create a list of ideas for new posts to be a complement of your already made content. Try to make a list of 3 ideas from each blog post. Don’t be afraid to seem foolish, as you’ll screening each one of them before creating new posts.
Audit your homepage
Check you site homepage images, text, colors, and details:
- The value proposition your offering to users;
- The message;
- The images;
- The click to action buttons;
- The social proof;
- How people react in the beginning and in the ending.
Give some attention to your email and newsletters subscribers
You might have heard that email and newsletters are dead. Not true.
When done the right way, emails are still one of the highest return of investment marketing channels available.
Give some love to your lists. Have them clean up. Start by segment people that don’t interact with your messages. Move them to a new list and send them an email asking if they want to continue to receive your emails.
It’s a great way to keep your lists sane and useful.
Check the relationship between site and social networks
Are you using social networks to your website benefit? In how many social networks are you? Do you use them all?
Try to figure out how to make the best use of them to promote your website, connect with people and customers.
If you are in too many networks and don’t have the time to manage them properly, choose the best for your case and forget the other ones. Remove the logo and link from your site.
Try all the contact forms you have on your website
This one is mandatory. It’s astonishing the number of websites I have found with contact forms that don’t work, wrong phone numbers and even Google Maps pointing to old facilities.
I like to recommend a monthly schedule for this particular task, so it’s imperative to do it at least at every six months.
Conclusion
Use this list as a sort of a guide for some tasks you can implement to enhance your website. Of course, you can add some more lines with additional duties.
But please, don’t add something like ‘create a backup,’ or ‘check performance.’ Or even ‘update plugins.’ These are things you should always be doing, on a day to day basis.
This list is a friendly reminder to do some gig related to your WordPress website health. It’s a time to time check up. The backup, performance analysis, and plugins update are the everyday food. You shouldn’t forget them just like you shouldn’t forget to eat or drink.