Get Your Website in Better Shape for 2022

Whether you consider yourself a resolution person or not, pausing to ‘check yourself before you wreck yourself' has become a classic exercise at the drop of each New Year ball. The most common resolutions tend to revolve around health and wellness, as people make grand plans to lose weight, eat better, and exercise more. 

While that's not a huge surprise, we should all take note of another interesting fact. Surveys show that many 2022 resolutions include mental wellness, with one in five people planning to spend less time on social media this year hoping to improve their mental health. If you're a business owner, this is significant news and the motivation behind this blog post. 

With the growing trend of people craving a digital detox, how prepared are you to communicate outside of social media? Do you own your own space online? If you have a website, is it optimized and up to date? These are pressing questions as we plunge deeper into the first quarter, and right now is the perfect time to give your website a health check. Resolve to get internet-fit for 2022.

Website Health Stats 

Just as you need to keep tabs on your weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and other such stats - the same can be said for your company's website. You need to check that your website is lean, responsive, optimized, and secure. We've talked about some of these critical website attributes before, but putting it in fresh terms may make it easier to understand. The life expectancy of your business could depend on it. So, here's a list of specific questions to ask:

Age

How long has it been since your last update? We suggest redesigning your website every two years. Technologies, algorithms, and UX design trends will undoubtedly change more frequently than that, but around the two-year mark, it becomes worth the effort to get things up to speed.

Weight 

How bloated is your website? Does your navigation have too many tabs? Are your pages overwhelmed with too much content? If you're on WordPress or Wix, do you have too many plug-ins that are weighing the site down?

Agility

How responsive is your website? Does it seamlessly self-adjust from a laptop to an iPhone or tablet? Also, how easy is it to make a quick text edit or photo swap? Customers expect fresh information on a website, so it helps to have a content management system (CMS) with drag-and-drop functionality to make edits in a snap and on the fly.

Speed

Does your website load within 2.5 seconds? If you're on WordPress, this could be one of your biggest issues. You may need to switch to a new and better framework in order to gain speed you need to capture more customers. Another culprit of slow-loading times is having photos and videos that are too big. You'll want to check under the hood and correct those, too.

Security

Does your website have an SSL certificate? Since 2018, every website that doesn't begin with ‘HTTPS' has been marked as unsecure by Google and continues to receive an SEO penalty.

Also, how secure is your CMS? Is it up-to-date with the latest security measures so you don't become a target for hackers? Significant data breaches on platforms like WordPress are getting more common every day. They can impact anyone on the platform, including small businesses that don't know why or how they've become a victim. Unfortunately, it just comes with the territory of being on a highly targeted platform.

What Google Has to Say About It

If you're still not sure about the importance of making these upgrades, you may want to consider that Google is doing a little health check of its own on your website. Last summer, they rolled out their Core Web Vitals to crack down on poor user experiences. 

In a nutshell, the vitals measure how long it takes a user to view your page, how easy it is to interact with the content, and how seamless the design experience is. The faster, cleaner, better the experience, the higher your website will rank, and the more traffic they'll send your way. To put that into perspective, Google controls 90% of the global search engine market with over 227 million searches every hour. So, you definitely want to be on their good side.

Time to Get Pumped

Before we turn the page on January, we hope you're convinced and ready to get your website in tip-top shape. If you need help doing that, we're your people. Our Modular Orange product could be the solution you need to get up to speed. It's fast, responsive, secure, affordable, and, in most cases, we can write, design, and launch your website within a week. Contact us to book your spot and get pumped up for a great year!