Website Housekeeping

Cleaning up technical issues

[buckworks]

In the last week or two I've been focused on polishing existing web pages rather than creating new content.

The motivation was a comment by my favorite CEO that "It's good to think out of the box but you still have to make sure that what's IN your box is in good shape."

So, I've been checking pages with an assortment of tools and finding lots of things that can be improved.

Pick a page, run a tool on it and see what turns up. Start with your busiest pages, but also check some pages at random.

If the tool turns up errors or warnings, work through them and address the issue(s). Pay special attention to fixes within your templates. Improving a template or include may benefit many pages besides the one you're looking at. Repeat with a different tool.

Some things to check for:

• Broken or redirecting links
  
• Page speed
  
• Mobile usability
  
• Accessibility
  
• Validation
  
• Google Search Console - crawl errors etc.
  
• Other?
  

What else could or should I be looking at?

[TravisDGarrett]

- CSS, JS, HTML optimizations, getting ride of unnecessarily or redundant codes,

- By validation, I guess you mean HTML/CSS validation,

- Verify that the pages are displayed the same way, under common web browsers,

- Images optimizations,

Indirectly related:

- a switch HTTPS, if it's not yet the case,

- verify that your site complies with the EU GDPR even if you are not in the EU,

[not2easy]

Older sites need a look at policy pages, the privacy policy in particular might need some changes.

Try out your contact forms to make sure they work as expected.

[TravisDGarrett]

Beside Mobile usability, you can also check for all kind of screen size. Minding mobile users is good nowadays, but the same time there are more and more desktop users with bigger screen.

[piatkow]

I agree about testing contact (and other) forms. I once discovered that something that I have never managed to identify meant that my original "thank you" pages suddenly stopped appearing.

It is worth just sitting down and reading the content occasionally. There is always the risk that something isn't quite up to date, especially if you have let the same information appear in two different places.

Mobile: Don't rely on desktop simulators, use your phone to check the site, as regularly as you would with the desktop.

[keyplyr]

While the topic of this thread is important to remind everyone to keep focus, I can't even imagine a site owner doing otherwise.

I don't understand those who don't stay diligent with their sites. I know plenty of people like this, I just don't understand it.

The amount of time and work I have put into developing web properties alone puts it extremely high on my priorities list, aside from being one of my main income sources.

I constantly navigate through my sites, following different paths, observing how the pages and their components behave with the top several browsers, mobile and desktop.

There is always something I find that could be improved or updated. Many times it is the wording, sometimes the content itself.

BTW - a properly done responsive layout should accomodate all screen sizes, no matter the device.

[hannamyluv]

We try to check every article on our site once a year for the following:
- Broken links
- Can we add links to new content
- Typos (even the best editors in the world miss things)
- are the images on the article as relevant as they could be

If we have time, we also look at:
- Is this a long placed article that is not getting traffic?

If we find that to be the case, we review the article and see if the content and SEO to the article could be tweaked.

Now, I say that like we do that 100%, but this stuff tends to get lost in everyday stuff. I have actually been toying with hiring a "old content" admin to make sure someone looks at this stuff regularly. It is easy to push off to the side, but is pretty low hanging fruit.

[buckworks]

Thanks, everyone. This is good input!

this stuff tends to get lost in everyday stuff

Yes. A good to-do list program is your friend. Create periodic reminders for tasks that you want to keep up with but that don't need to be on your radar every day.

Another task: review ads in the AdSense review center. I set a reminder to do that a couple of times per month.

[keyplyr]

I've found if I don't review Adsense ads in the Ad Review Center at least once (usually 3 ) times per day, too many ugly and unwanted ads get to my pages and devalue my content or even drive away traffic.

We all have our offenders. Mine are the green "download now" buttons, anything that says 'install' and the "make this into a PDF" and of course the Adblocker ads.

Politics and Religion are blocked by category, but occasionally one of those get through to my pages if I don't keep a diligent watch of the Ad Review Center.

[explorador]

What else could or should I be looking at?

General functionality and error messages or warnings. All you described is good, but sometimes pages work just too well (speed and performance) and it can be related to some changed on the server breaking some things, sometimes those broken things don't make the site slower but faster.

I've designed and coded all my CMS with perl, I never face the kind of trouble I faced using PHP where suddenly one thing is deprecated or removed and affects the sites when the version of PHP gets updated, instead the only problem has been when someone changes permissions on the server, but never something like PHP.

Another thing: JS errors or warnings. Sometimes things change and stop being "compatible", yes it happens, and this can affect you when using CDN, I host the libraries on my server instead (yes I know, yes I know...) but saves me the trouble.

[piatkow]

In terms of HTML and programming my site was fine this morning but when I went to change a couple of lines of text I remembered my own advice and re-read the whole section of the site. What I thought would take 10 minutes ended up taking half the morning to get everything in line.

Sometimes the mark 1 eyeball is best.