Ready to ring in the New Year? Before the calendar flips and the ball drops, make sure that your website is ready to enter a new year, too.
The end of the year is rapidly approaching. In most offices, billable work is slowing down and folks are taking care of their own EOY housekeeping tasks. When online traffic is low during the holiday season, this is actually a great opportunity to review and update your website.
From content to performance, here is an end-of-year website audit checklist that will help you ensure that your website continues to deliver an excellent, accurate, and valuable user experience in 2023.
✓ Is the content still relevant?
If you have not published anything new to your website recently, now is a good time to add some fresh content. Search engines respond to recency, and readers respond to relevance.
Consider publishing an end-of-year blog post that describes the professional highlights of the past 12 months. You could also post a short message of gratitude for your team and the clients who have trusted you with their cases. At the very least, make sure you’ve updated your holiday hours to reflect seasonal closures and your availability.
✓ Is the content still ethical?
Ethics decisions are released throughout the year—and these guidelines may affect your website. For example, attorneys in New Jersey recently got new guidance on including attorney rating badges on their websites.
Check with your state bar for ethics decisions and adjust your website accordingly.
✓ Is your team list still accurate?
If you lost or added team members this year, ensure that your attorney profile page is up-to-date. Delete or redirect pages for people who no longer work with your firm.
It’s also worth asking your team if anyone would like to update their profile. Did they earn any additional qualifications? Did they achieve a personal or professional milestone?
✓ Do all your links work?
Links are a critical component of SEO. Spend some time reviewing your website and testing internal and external links.
Checking links can be tedious, but it’s important not to send visitors to outdated websites.
✓ Is your website performing well?
Performance is another key element of SEO, particularly load speed and mobile responsiveness. If you added new content or even new plugins in the past year, your site’s performance could take a hit.
Run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to assess how well your site is performing.
✓ Is your website still accessible?
As we’ve previously emphasized, accessibility is an ongoing responsibility. New additions in the last year could be making your website less accessible. New WCAG guidelines could require other updates, too, to ensure your site can accommodate disabled visitors.
Remember, one in four adult Americans are disabled. Millions of people use assistive technology to access the Internet. The WebAIM WAVE tool is a great place to start. However, you will likely need the help of a web developer to manually audit several critical site components for accessibility.
Review and next steps
Seize this opportunity at the end of the year to audit your website.
- Check for accuracy in content and links.
- Ensure that your site conforms to the newest ethics guidelines.
- Assess performance and tweak where necessary.
- Test for accessibility and make changes.
Website management is not why you became an attorney—yet you need a great website to attract clients and establish yourself as a thought leader.
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