Kristen Doyle 0:00
When was the last time you actually looked at your own website, not just the back end, where you add new products or blog posts, but logged out and really looked at it through your customers eyes? I recently learned the hard way how important that is, because my WooCommerce store was accidentally set to coming soon mode, and it stayed there for weeks before I noticed.
Kristen Doyle 0:27
More on that in a minute, but today we are talking about spring cleaning for your website, not just the routine maintenance that you should be doing every week, but a deeper spring clean that keeps your site secure, running fast and actually converting visitors into buyers.
Kristen Doyle 0:44
Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like teachers pay teachers, Etsy or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you’re in the right place.
Kristen Doyle 1:00
Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I’m Kristen Doyle, and I’m here to give you no fluff, tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process. Things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automation, and so much more. Let’s get started y’all.
Kristen Doyle 1:23
Back to my WooCommerce incident. See, I had been absolutely swamped with client work in my web design and coaching business. Plus it was baseball season, so we’re constantly on the run as a family, and for several weeks, I had just not taken the time to actually look at my teaching resource website, you know, the one where I sell all the digital products in my WooCommerce store.
Kristen Doyle 1:48
I was doing the bare minimum maintenance, updating plugins when I needed to, making sure the backups were running, but I wasn’t actually visiting the site like a customer would. Big mistake. What I didn’t realize is that during one of WooCommerce updates, there was a glitch that randomly put my store into coming soon mode, and so for somewhere between two and three weeks, my store is basically closed without me knowing it.
Kristen Doyle 2:13
Now with my clients, when we make updates, we have a procedure and we go and we visually check the site every single time, but because I was in busy mode and I was doing the bare minimum for my own site, I just didn’t do that check. It’s a good reminder for why we have that protocol as a team and why we do that for our clients.
Kristen Doyle 2:34
But what happened is anyone who tried to make a purchase during that time just couldn’t. I don’t even want to think about how many sales I missed, all because I hadn’t taken those few minutes after I did my updates to go and look at my site from the front end like a logged out user.
Kristen Doyle 2:50
Now this is exactly why we need to do more on our websites than just routine maintenance. Your website needs a deep clean every now and then, kind of like your house needs a deep clean every now and then. You can think of it like spring cleaning for your digital home.
Kristen Doyle 3:04
There’s three main benefits to doing this. First of all, you’ll get better site performance. See everything you add to your site, everything you have installed, every plug in, every image, every script adds to your overall load time. And when you clean things up and you remove what you don’t need, your site gets faster. And we all know faster sites are better, right?
Kristen Doyle 3:23
Second, you’ll have better security. See those unused plugins and themes, things like that, are basically like unlock doors for a hacker, and even if they’re deactivated, if they’re still installed, they create problems. The same thing goes for unused admin accounts, outdated software, things like that.
Kristen Doyle 3:42
And third, you get a better user experience when you make sure everything is working like it should, that customers can buy your products, that contact forms work, that nothing is broken or outdated. This all contributes to a better user experience, which keeps people sticking around your site and actually taking the action you want them to take.
Kristen Doyle 4:01
Now, I’ve got other episodes on basic maintenance that I recommend you do every single week, and I’ll link to that in the show notes, as well as to a free checklist on WordPress maintenance. But today we’re talking about that deeper clean. I recommend you do it once a quarter, or at least once a year, to go through and do a more thorough review on your site.
Kristen Doyle 4:23
Trust me, the 15,30, maybe 45 minutes that you spend on this could really save you from losing a bunch of sales like I probably did. So let’s walk through what you should actually check during your website’s spring cleaning. I’ll break it down into three main areas, security and performance, user experience and your content.
Kristen Doyle 4:44
All right, first up, security and performance. Now I also did a full episode recently on protecting your site from hackers, and I dive into a lot of the security things there. It’s episode 134 and I’ll link that in the show notes as well, but I won’t rehash all those details since that. Is available for you.
Kristen Doyle 5:01
But as a quick refresher, you want to make sure to review your plugins. Remove any that you’re not actively using. Even deactivated plugins can create some security vulnerabilities. They can slow down your website. I know sometimes we leave a plugin installed on the site because we used it once, and we might need to use it again, and we don’t want to forget what plugin we used, but if it’s not something that you’re using on a regular basis, and you’re just saving it as an in case, then you really should just delete it and add it back if you ever do need it in the future.
Kristen Doyle 5:32
Now what I do for this, so I don’t forget, is I keep a list inside my Notion account. That’s kind of where I store all of my databases of things in my business. I keep a list in Notion of plugins that I like to use for what purpose, and a link directly over to the plugin so I can install them really easily if I ever need to again, and I don’t have to go searching for it or trying to remember what I used before.
Kristen Doyle 5:55
Another thing you want to do is make sure all your themes and your plugins are up to date. You should be doing this every week, but while you’re in there for your spring cleaning, check is a good time to catch up if you’ve gotten behind on those updates. You want to check and make sure you don’t have any extra admin accounts that aren’t necessary.
Kristen Doyle 6:11
So anyone who is not actively, currently working on your site who truly needs administrator level access should either get removed completely or reduce down to editor or author level permissions instead of admin access. See an admin on your site has access to literally everything, and that means that they can completely break your website if they so choose to do.
Kristen Doyle 6:38
Most people would never do that on purpose, but they might accidentally. The bigger issue, the bigger concern, is really that if their password gets hacked, then the hacker has access to everything. So anyone who doesn’t need to be an admin should get reduced down to lower level permissions, and anyone who isn’t currently working on your site, like that VA or that web designer you hired a year or two ago who isn’t doing anything on your site anymore. Those should just get removed.
Kristen Doyle 7:06
You’ll also want to run a quick speed test. You can use GT metrics or Google Page Speed Insights. I like to use both of those because they do sometimes give different information, and they can both help you see how your site is loading in terms of performance, and identify any performance issues that you might need to fix. Keep in mind, everything that you have installed on your site contributes to that overall size and load time, so the leaner you can keep it, the better your site will perform.
Kristen Doyle 7:34
Next up, let’s talk about doing a little bit of a user experience audit. Now this is somewhere that I see a lot of website owners drop the ball, and it honestly is exactly where I made that pretty costly mistake with my WooCommerce store. You need to regularly experience your website like your customers and your visitors do. This means logging out of your admin account, ideally opening the site in a private browser window or an incognito window, so that you can click through and experience it without any caching or cookies in place to help you make it easier and faster.
Kristen Doyle 8:10
When you do that, here’s what you want to check. Click through every important page on your website. Start with your home page and just kind of follow the flow that a visitor might take. Clicking through all the links. Test all your main navigation links to make sure that they lead to the right pages where they should, that they open in a new window. If they need to.
Kristen Doyle 8:28
Fill out your contact forms, to make sure those are working properly, that you receive the response in your inbox. If you have an appointment scheduler on your website, schedule a call with yourself and make sure that those automations trigger the way that they should, that everything goes through the right way. And make test purchases in your store. I recommend creating a coupon code. You can do that for 99% off, or something like that, so you can create a purchase and complete it with actual dollars, but without spending too much.
Kristen Doyle 8:56
This verifies that your checkout process and your payment processor is working cleanly from start to finish, and then view your site on desktop and on mobile to make sure that it’s responsive and that it’s looking good on different devices. If you have access to multiple different types of devices in your house, look at it on all the different types that you have to make sure that it’s looking good everywhere.
Kristen Doyle 9:17
When you’re doing this audit, pay attention to how things feel. Is the navigation intuitive? Does the site load quickly? Would a first time visitor know what to do next? Really try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes for this.
Kristen Doyle 9:29
All right, the last thing you want to do is take some time to review the actual content on your site. But I don’t mean every single blog post or anything like that. That would take ages, and honestly, it’s just not necessary to do, typically.But what you want to look at is check for outdated information, especially on those important pages, like your about page, your products or your services pages, FAQs, places where information might have changed, check and make sure everything is up to date there.
Kristen Doyle 9:56
Look for broken links or images that aren’t displaying the way that they should. And pay special attention to pages that directly lead to sales things like your product listing pages, your sales pages, and maybe even your about page. Another thing to check is anywhere you might have listed timelines for something. So if your about page includes some content about how much experience you have in your industry, that number changes every single year, so check up on that and make sure that those things have been updated.
Kristen Doyle 10:28
You also want to make sure your call to action buttons are working and that you have good, strong phrasing in those that really encourages action something better than click here. One thing I like to do when I’m doing this content review is read my content out loud. It is amazing how much easier it is to catch awkward phrasing or outdated information when you hear it, as opposed to just reading it visually, because a lot of us, when we read visually, we are skimming in our brain, and we are just not paying as much attention. So I recommend reading it out loud.
Kristen Doyle 10:58
Keep in mind that website is really the first impression that people have of your business a lot of times, and so you don’t want to have outdated content or broken functionality or links, because that really sends the message to people that your business might not be as active or as professional as you want it to look like you are.
Kristen Doyle 11:16
All right, now that you know what to check, let’s talk about how to kind of implement this maintenance schedule so it doesn’t feel too overwhelming. I find that breaking it into different levels of frequency works well for people, especially when we’re busy. So you might want to try doing a quick check once a quarter. Spend about 15 minutes on this. This is kind of a quick scan just to catch major issues.
Kristen Doyle 11:37
Double check and make sure your plugins are up to date, although, like I said, you should be doing that weekly, not quarterly. Update any plugins or themes that need to be updated, and then log out. Visit your site like a customer and just check the main things that are most important. Check things like, can people opt in? Can they make purchases? Double check your site on mobile to make sure everything still looks good, but just give it a quick check.
Kristen Doyle 12:00
This is literally something you could do in one day while you’re drinking your coffee one morning. It doesn’t have to be an exhaustive dig through everything. You’re just hitting the most important parts. And then once a year, like in the spring, for your spring cleaning, set aside half hour, 45 minutes to do a more thorough review of your site. This is when you’ll go through that entire checklist that we just talked about, do those speed tests, maybe set aside some time in your calendar to implement those optimizations you need to from those speed tests.
Kristen Doyle 12:29
Make the test purchases, review and update content that might be outdated on those important pages. You can also spend some time during this annual kind of deep clean, cleaning up your media library and getting rid of those unused plugins. Check all your forms, the integrations, the automation, just make sure everything is working. Now I like to either plan this when I know it’s a slow season in my business and I’m going to have extra time to work on things, or when I’m working on planning out goals, setting aside time for those sorts of things. It’s a good way to make sure your website’s ready to support whatever you’re doing ongoing in the future in terms of launches or promotions.
Kristen Doyle 13:04
The key to this website maintenance really is consistency. So I want you to add these check ins to your calendar right now. Seriously, pause the episode if you need to. Go to your calendar, put them in and make them recurring tasks. Once a year, a spring cleaning. Once a quarter, a quick check. Without those calendar reminders, it is just way too easy to let that maintenance slide until something is broken.
Kristen Doyle 13:28
Like I said, I learned that lesson the hard way with my WooCommerce store incident, and now I have people on my team in charge of checking that for me, because they do a great job checking that stuff on all the client sites when we make updates, and sometimes I get busy and don’t take time to do that for my own business. So make sure that you’re creating those protocols like I had to do, so that you don’t find yourself in the same situation.
Kristen Doyle 13:53
All right, this week, I want you to block out 15 minutes just to do that quick check of your website. Visit your site like a customer would try to buy something, fill out your contact form, just click around those main pages and make sure everything looks good, and then pencil in some time into your schedule to fix anything that just isn’t working right. Go ahead and get that spring cleaning time scheduled in as well, and make sure you put it on that recurring task.
Kristen Doyle 14:20
If you made it to the end of this episode and you want to learn more about how to keep your website in tip top shape year round, I’ve made a free WordPress maintenance checklist for you, so just head over to kristendoyle.co/maintenance, and you’ll find a clickable link in the show notes here to grab that checklist and download it so you make sure you don’t miss anything when you’re doing these checks, I’ll talk to you soon.
