Your Website 2024 New Year’s Resolutions

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Website Development / Your Website 2024 New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year!

Now that January is here, you’ve definitely already outlined how you’re going to improve your organization’s website this year, right?

Right?

If you’re not planning a website redesign, there’s still plenty you can (and should!) be doing to improve your current site this year.

Remember, your website is a work of art – never finished, only abandoned.

Here are 5 resolutions for your website in 2024.

1. Get a 95% or Higher in GTMetrix

So much about your website hinges on its performance: how quickly it loads, how difficult it is to interact with, and how it compares to the competition.

The best way to measure your site’s performance is with GTmetrix, one of our recommended website testing tools. We trust in GTmetrix because it’s more practical than tools like Google’s Pagespeed Insights (which often makes recommendations that would completely strip your site of any branding or personality), while giving you accurate, useful suggestions.

Your goal should be to get at least a 95% performance score when testing your organization’s homepage. Getting 100% would be better, but we’ll leave a little wiggle room for things that are out of your control (like third-party scripts or fonts).

Ours currently ranks at 97%, and we’re going to try and get those last 3% this year.

To improve your site’s performance and speed score in GTmetrix, look to caching plugins like WP Rocket, image optimization plugins like Imagify, and restructuring some of your site’s code.

2. Update Your High-Performing, Evergreen Content

You know which pages on your website generate the most traffic, right?

Right?

(Don’t make me insert that Star Wars meme again)

Every site has content that consistently shows up in your traffic reports, even if you don’t think it’s the most useful or best content you’ve ever created. Newsflash: if people are consistently coming to it over time, it’s definitely useful.

Assuming the content is evergreen, invest time in improving and updating it with the latest information, as well as links to related content relevant to the people accessing it. We did this recently with our post on how to fix social media images, making it more useful to users finding it for the first time as well as signaling to Google that it is “new” content.

Want a detailed guide for updating content for SEO? Search Engine Journal has you covered.

3. Improve Your Accessibility (Beyond the Widget)

Accessibility continues to be an important part of a thoughtful, well-rounded website – and the best practices for making your site accessible are, well, more accessible than ever.

Testing your website accessibility is the most important first step. If your site comes up short, it may seem like you only need to install an accessibility widget, like EqualWeb or AccessiBe.

While those widgets do provide value – we have one here on our site! – they are not the panacea to making your site completely accessible. Despite what some widget vendors may say, simply installing their one line of code doesn’t mean your site is completely accessible or 508 compliant. There’s certainly some value to allowing users to adjust font sizes, color contrast, and more – but that’s the starting point, not the end.

Test your website with the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool and start making fixes – both technical and design – to ensure your site is completely accessible to all users.

4. Visit Your Website on Mobile – and Make it Less Annoying

Most marketing decision-makers spend the majority of the time visiting their website on desktops … which isn’t at all inline with how most users do it.

You do know what percentage of your website traffic comes via mobile, right?

Right?

In 2024, resolve to spend more time on your website on your mobile and tablet devices, engaging with the site and taking action like your users actually do.

There’s nothing quite like seeing how difficult it is to accomplish a task on mobile to understand how you’re annoying your users.

Pull up your site on your phone and attempt to do the most common things your users do. Make a list of everything that was difficult during the experience, and fix the problems.

5. Start Tracking Stats that Actually Matter

If you’re reporting on your website and digital marketing performance, you know that there’s a firehose of potential statistics you can be analyzing, comparing, and working towards.

But not all stats are created equal, especially when it comes to what you’re really working to accomplish.

Pageviews and new users have always been low-hanging fruit for marketing decision-makers to measure, but are they really appropriate for you?

Take a hard look at your website’s goal. Is it sales? Is it lead generation? Is it donations? Is it RFP submissions? Is it event registrations? Maybe it is pageviews or new users.

Whatever your goal is, be laser-focused on tracking that statistic’s performance. Don’t measure time on site or pageviews per visit if they’re irrelevant to your organization’s goals. Report on the stats that actually matter to your organization, and focus on making those better each month.

Bonus Tip: Automate the Copyright Year in Your Footer

It’s 2024. Did you update the copyright year in the footer of your site?

If you automated it, you wouldn’t have to remember to change it!

Take a look at the footer of your site – if it still says 2018, well, you’re not paying enough attention. Reach out and we’ll happily automate it for you so you never have to worry about it again.