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fter months of planning and hard work, your slick, modern website is finally live for all the world to see. (Congratulations!) You may be thinking your work is done, and it’s time to sit back and watch the leads come in. However, launching a new site doesn’t mean your job is totally finished — it’s just reshaped itself a bit.
Once a website launches, the focus shifts from designing and building to monitoring, maintaining, and optimizing. You’ll need to assess how your SEO strategy is performing, whether your conversion rate is increasing, and where your site visitors are coming from. Here’s our list of the top things we watch out for when maintaining a client’s website, and why they’re important:
Website Traffic
Site traffic is one of the most common KPIs. Why? For starters, it serves as a barometer of your overall site performance (as well as your inbound marketing tactics.) Using Google Analytics for this tracking gives you access to a treasure trove of information, including not only the number of visitors, but also their demographics, general location, and online behavior. Having a solid understanding of this data can serve you well across the board, from identifying the most popular content to creating recommendation engines and marketing strategies that align with what your site visitors are drawn to most.
Conversions
These metrics are really what it all boils down to — enticing your site visitors to take action. To buy, to subscribe, to visit, to make an appointment. Your conversion metrics and goals are uniquely yours, and something that you should set when you first begin your website redesign process. Measuring those outcomes is a clear indicator of whether your efforts are positively impacting your business goals. If you aren’t seeing numbers you like, it’s an opportunity to try and figure out where the bottlenecks are, do some A/B testing, or work with an experienced marketing agency to further optimize your site.
Page Load Time
Think about your reaction when a web page takes “forever” to load (even if it’s really just a few seconds.) We expect our digital experience to be instantaneous, and a slow-to-load website can cause a ripple effect of issues, from higher bounce rates to lower search rankings. While our agency will optimize page load time as part of the initial website build, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the overall speed of your site after launch to ensure everything is running efficiently. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can help identify pages that need optimization, as well as differences between browser and mobile vs. desktop, in order to ensure a seamless user experience.
Site Uptime
Even worse than slow-loading pages? Pages that won’t load at all. A site that’s down can be detrimental to your online presence, especially if you’re in the middle of running a marketing campaign that’s sending people to your landing page. Even if you’re working with a strong website agency, it’s essential to keep eyes on your site every day to make sure that it’s generally loading and working the way you want. You can also use a monitoring service, like Pingdom or Uptime, that will do that work for you and send you alerts if your site goes down.
Security
Cybersecurity threats are constantly present. And, if you’re gathering customer information like addresses and payment information, it’s imperative to keep it safe. To ensure a safe website — especially if you’re using a complicated site that’s built on WordPress — we recommend adding a security plugin (if you haven’t already) like Wordfence. These services can protect your new website from malware and monitor for any outdated software or weak spots in your infrastructure.
SEO Performance
This is probably the most hands-on element of post-launch maintenance, especially since the rules around SEO change regularly. Keeping a close eye on your SEO metrics will give you a good picture of what phrases your visitors are using to search and whether your strategy is effective. As your brand continues to grow and evolve, you’ll likely be adding additional content to your site — so ensuring that new copy is optimized for search engines is crucial. It’s also important to track, maintain and grow your site’s performance every month, which is why we recommend clients choose an ongoing SEO package.
User Feedback
It’s always important to remember that your website is designed for your ideal audience. People who have interacted with your site from a completely objective point of view can have valuable insights, so it’s a good idea to find out what they have to say. You can use surveys, feedback forms, or social media channels to gather the information, but the key is to look for repeated comments or trends (There will always be outliers.) Engaging with your audience in this manner also helps build trust and loyalty.
Our team of experts is dedicated to making sure that our clients’ sites remain well-oiled and focused on meeting business objectives. If you’d like help optimizing your website, let’s talk.