Spring Cleaning: Your Website and Digital Marketing Checklist

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Website Design / Spring Cleaning: Your Website and Digital Marketing Checklist

It’s spring, and along with the flowers blooming, afternoon rain showers, and tree pollen, it’s the time of year for decluttering, organizing, and cleaning!

While your physical home may get some sprucing up during your spring cleaning, it’s a perfect opportunity to review and tidy up your website and digital marketing, too.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with your digital marketing spring cleaning, but you should check in and make sure that everything you’re doing is still following best practices and representative of your brand.

Here’s your spring cleaning checklist for your organization’s website and digital marketing.

Test and Fix Your Website’s Accessibility

Even the best sites – those built with accessibility fundamentals and run by a thoughtful website gatekeeper – have accessibility issues creep in over time.

Whether it’s images missing ALT text, a newly introduced color that doesn’t meet contrast ratio guidelines, or form fields without labels, accessibility problems happen. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s something that you should try and keep to a minimum.

For spring cleaning this year, test your most important pages with the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. It’ll show you both the site-wide and page-specific errors to address.

Once you fix the problems, run the test again and you should be in the clear.

Update Your Social Media Branding

The logos, cover photos, and descriptions on your social media pages are usually way at the bottom of the priority list; once you set them, you tend to forget them. I’ve seen organizations who change their logo for a special event and take months (or even years) to change them back.

Don’t let that be you!

As part of your spring cleaning, update your social media cover photos, descriptions, and logo, as appropriate. Make sure your description or tagline is up-to-date, and any relevant contact information is current.

Need some inspiration for cover photos or your overall social media presence? Yeah, we’ve got you covered.

Improve Your Website’s Speed and Performance

We’re always going to remind you to test your website’s performance and making sure it’s loading as fast as possible. Every bit of usability research shows that any delay in website speed has a direct impact on whether or not a person takes action.

Amazon did the research, finding even a 100ms delay costs the company 1% in sales. Don’t let a slow site cost you.

Test your website in GTmetrix during your spring cleaning, and immediately address any issues that arise.

There are a number of best practices to speed up your website, and none of them are rocket science.

Clean Up Your Email Marketing List

Making sure your subscriber data is accurate and complete always seems to be a back-burner project, or something set aside for a summer intern. Do we really need all of these tags? Why do we have users that haven’t opened an email in 2 years?

While it could take you a little longer to do, cleaning up your email marketing list is going to pay big dividends moving forward.

This spring cleaning, invest in improving your email marketing lists and users. Clean up and streamline data about each subscriber, and remove addresses that haven’t engaged in some time.

Better lists lead to increased open rates and outperforming email benchmarks by industry.

Review and Modernize Your Brand Guide

When was the last time you updated your style guide? Don’t be embarrassed – we won’t hold it against you.

If you’re like most marketing decision-makers, you spent a lot of time building that brand guide … but probably haven’t done much with it since.

Review your brand guide, with a special focus on use of your logo, colors, fonts, and your voice, as part of your spring cleaning.

Even if it’s not time to rebrand or refresh, you can still tweak your brand guide so that it feels inspirational and current with how your organization has evolved over the year.

Spring Cleaning: Get Your House in Order

Doesn’t it feel good to spring clean and tidy up all of your digital marketing efforts?

All of the work you do moves your organization’s mission forward, and by taking some time to get your digital house in order, you’re setting yourself up for success for the rest of the year. Need some help making it all happen? Reach out and let’s chat.