Tips to Spring Clean or Redesign Your Website (And Why We’re Choosing to Overhaul)

Tips to Spring Clean or Redesign Your Website (And Why We’re Choosing to Overhaul)

Today, 27 years after the first one was launched, websites are still important. And they’re not just for businesses anymore. (I mean, there are now famous dogs with cool websites.)

At 9 Clouds, we believe it’s important for all businesses to have an online home that is fresh, efficient, and secure.

After all, your website is your first impression for most visitors. It should look great, but it also needs to work toward your goals effectively. Every site should have a purpose, whether it be educating leads, connecting people, or selling cars. In order to keep the site focused, it takes of lot of upkeep.

And sometimes, a website needs a full-on overhaul. 

9Clouds.com Redesign + Development

The team at 9 Clouds is ready to do a full-on overhaul with our website.

If you’re not ready for that (and you’re not a designer or developer), you might want to hop on down to the next section to get my website spring cleaning recommendations.

There are plenty of good reasons to redesign your website:

  • The site isn’t mobile-responsive.
  • Your business focus has changed.
  • Your aren’t getting the results you want.

Our current site isn’t necessarily broken or ineffective — but we know it can be better.

That’s the catalyst behind our decision to seek bids for design and development of a new site for 9 Clouds.

We have a stronger sense of our sales funnel now than we ever have before. We have more educational resources available. We need to clean house, clarify direction, and simplify our messaging.  

Spring Clean Your Own Website

Even if you’re not at the point of overhauling your whole site, there’s no reason you shouldn’t give it a little spruce. Let’s call it digital spring cleaning.

Ensure Security

Does your site have a padlock ? in the address bar? It’s a green symbol on Chrome or a little gray lock on Safari.

To ensure this security is in place, you’ll want to convert your site from HTTP to HTTPS, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol secure. Sites with HTTPS have a SSL/TLS certificate. In less tech-y terms, this means sensitive information will be encrypted and protected when traveling to and from your server. 

The best news is that Google rewards HTTPS sites over HTTP competitors, so adding this security measure will benefit your SEO as well.

Round up Errors

If you aren’t doing this already, now is a great time to take a peek through Google Search Console and look for crawl errors on your website.

A few 404 pages are okay, but they are not something you want to pile up. Your website users don’t appreciate missing pages — and neither does Google. Fixing these issues will be another easy way to boost your SEO. 

Audit Your Content

Spring is as good a time as any to sit down with your Google Analytics and find out which pages are performing best — and which could use a little TLC.

Are the top pages on your site reflective of your business’ current goals? Does traffic drop off in any surprising places? Does one page get better conversion than another? 

Find strategies that are working well, and apply those to new content moving forward into the rest of 2018.

Flex Your Branding Muscles

Healthy websites provide helpful experiences for visitors, which also builds SEO performance over time. The visual brand of your business is an essential part of that experience.

As you may have heard, 9 Clouds employees care about personal wellness. Digitally speaking, we also focus on the health of our brand.

Spring cleaning your website should also include your visual identity. Get your brand off of the couch, take it for a run, and make sure all of these items are used accurately and consistently throughout your site:

  • Logos
  • Fonts
  • Colors
  • Page templates
  • Buttons
  • Imagery
Including these elements in your website project will give you the right building blocks for a helpful user experience.

Celebrate New Beginnings

We’re ready for spring here in Sioux Falls. The snow is (finally) melting. The birds are celebrating (loudly). And we’re ready to spring clean our site ahead of a big, new launch.

I hope you can celebrate spring and all things new wherever you are, too!

If you know of someone who can help us with our site redesign, please pass along our RFP. We’re looking forward to this fresh start.

DOWNLOAD AND SHARE 9 CLOUDS RFP