Are you thinking of a website redesign? A lot of small business owners will usually be put off by the workload, but if your website isn’t getting enough quality leads, doesn’t match your branding or has outdated functionality, is it really performing for you?

Before you dive into a website relaunch or look to hit the launch button on your shinny new website if you are currently in the middle of a relaunch, in this article we have broken things down into 7 essential steps as part of your website relaunch checklist. Let’s get started!

1. Review your website on multiple devices

With mobile search now surpassing desktop, last year Google officially confirmed that they now use the mobile version of your website for indexing and rankings. Search engines now want to favour and help primary mobile users find what they are looking for so it’s crucial that your new website looks consistently great on mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

Along with being fully responsive, as a web design agency, we would recommend that you also test your website on multiple browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Microsoft Edge. You could even go as far as testing different browsers on different devices to ensure you deliver the perfect website!

If you do not have access to all these tools, there are free and paid options that will allow you to check how your website looks responsively, along with different browser testing.

2. New Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Focus

Before writing any content, any website rebuild will also present the chance to implement a full SEO restructure. Over time, every business will change their products/services so will need to focus on new keywords and SEO goals to reflect these changes. Starting from the very top, you will need to visualise a full-page restructure starting with the page title and the URL, and possibly a 301 redirect to make sure the each page follows your keyword strategy.

Next, you will need to focus on your SEO titles and descriptions to ensure everything is in sync to target your keywords. From here, you can then tailor and evolve your website page content based around your SEO keyword focus.

If you are using WordPress, I would highly recommend taking a look at Yoast SEO as this plugin offers great guidance into where to improve your SEO focus on a page-by-page basis based on your chosen keyword.

3. Check spelling and grammar

A website rebuild is the perfect opportunity to introduce and rewrite some new content. However, after you have written your keyword focused content, you can read it over and over and continue to miss spelling or grammar mistakes, even Microsoft Word doesn’t always pick up on everything.

Personally, I would advise on asking another member of your team to read through and pick up on some of the mistakes that are human error. As an alternative option, when you sign-up to our Cheshire web design agency membership, you will receive ongoing web support with optional SEO services where we can use our website audit tools to pick up on spelling mistakes.

4. Test internal & external hyperlinks

Organic link building is a great strategy to implement into any website rebuild… if it’s done correctly! Internal hyperlinks are links to pages within your website and a great way to keep the user engaged to read further content, or to follow a call-to-action. External hyperlinks are links to other websites.

A broken hyperlink can immediately holt the conversion process and can even lead to the user leaving your website. While internal links can be easily fixed, they can easily be missed if you have a website with lots of content. External hyperlinks are also out of your control because the external website may decide to change the URL, redirect the page or simply remove it.

Speaking professionally, I would highly advise to check all internal and external links on your website. There are free tools you can find online but may require payment for full access. Again, we have the tools and resources to test and fix all hyperlinks on your website.

5. Implement Speed Testing

Speed testing and website performance has become an increasingly important signal in how websites rank. Today, users have a much shorter attention span so if you’re website doesn’t load within recommended timeframe, chances are visitors will leave and move on elsewhere.

As part of our Cheshire web design agency memberships, we present our clients with monthly speed reports to monitor speed. However, there are many free tools out there such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom to see what’s slowing your website down.

6. Investigate your call-to-action

Almost every website will have at least one contact form, it usually acts as the call-to-action to encourage a user interact with your business and means they are one step closer to converting into a customer once they contact you or sign-up to your newsletter.

Once your contact forms have been implemented, you need to manually test every contact form on your website to make sure it is functioning correctly. Look to double and triple check that your contact form works, you can even get a friend or work colleague to test it, to make sure you not only get the website enquiry, but you also get all information.

7. All systems go on your new website!

Hit the launch button!

Once you have checked off these essential steps, you should be fully prepared to hit the launch button and get your new website live. If you wish to discuss a relaunch checklist in more detail, please contact our Cheshire web design agency