There are online marketing tasks that often get ignored until there is a crisis, so proactively handling them gives you a powerful advantage. With the start of the New Year, you want to ensure that you’re all set for prosperous and smooth sailing ahead.
We put together a list of critical, recurring, and other online marketing tasks that you don’t want to forget:
Tending To Broken Links
Moved or deleted web pages and external resources, or replaced images are seemingly minor changes that can, over time, have significant impacts on a website. While the impact is often positive, if broken links are not being resolved, the negative impact can add up quickly.
Some broken links can be fixed simply by updating the main navigation when core pages are moved or deleted, but it can be more complicated when it comes to internal links within content – where specialized tools can become very useful.
Review Content
It’s equally important that you produce content regularly, and that you review it for quality and relevance. You’ll typically find that, over time, some of it will become irrelevant and no longer serve a purpose, there may have been changes in your industry or your business, or it no longer meets your quality standards.
This is just the nature of content development, so some of your content may need to be trimmed or enhanced as you go. If you need to delete it, the URLs should then be redirected to the most relevant content that still exists; or, if there’s nothing relevant to a particular page, you can delete it without setting up a redirect. We recommend that if the page has any inbound links or has received any organic traffic over the last year, find something on your website to redirect it to.
Also, some content may no longer meet your quality guidelines, so you may need to rewrite it, add information, and/or include images, data, and links to other external resources.
Test For Page Speed
Data from various sources proves that page speed has a huge impact on user experience, and is also a ranking factor.
Performing small tweaks to your website can, over time, adversely affect page speed. From a font file to a JavaScript library to WordPress plugins, your website gets slower and slower.
Since this happens to most websites that are maintained and updated regularly, it’s really important to methodically test page speed, especially on your highest traffic pages. If you have a website that’s under 1,000 pages, we recommend testing all of your pages. This task doesn’t need to be done manually for each page, as the initial data can be collected inside Google analytics.
If a page typically takes much longer than three to five seconds to load, there are tools you can use to identify the elements that are causing the issues. They include WebPageTest.org or GTmetrics.
Review WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins could have a negative impact on page speed because they often include CSS and JavaScript files, and will even include JavaScript libraries that have already been en-queued by WordPress core, and often fonts like FontAwesome or Ionic Icons. All this can have a big, adverse effect on page speed.
To continue functioning properly, plugins must be updated regularly, and it needs to be done by the author. For various reasons, plugin authors may sometimes update their plugins, or in some cases may abandon them entirely – which can affect functionality, appearance, page speed, and technical SEO. There are cases when this can even make an entire website inaccessible.
We recommend reviewing WordPress plugins regularly, not only to make sure you have the most current version, but also to check whether the plugin author has kept it up to date with current standards.
In addition, it’s also wise to consider carefully whether each plugin is really necessary – eliminating an excess plugin will not only improve your page speed, but it’ll also reduce your maintenance workload and possibly improve security.
Test Browser Layout And Functionality
Small changes to your website throughout weeks or months could impact page speed as well as the look and function of unintended elements of some pages.
We recommend that, first, you identify the pages that drive 30 percent of your organic traffic for testing, and then identify any pages that are part of this group that are not critical to your business. Pages that deliver the bottom 10 percent of your organic traffic can be skipped.
While layout and functionality will, unfortunately, need to be checked manually, in most cases it takes no more than a few seconds per page.
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