Estimated read time: 3 minutes, 30 seconds

Spring is here (at least in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway!). As you go through your closets and dust under the bed, consider refreshing your digital presence as well. Spring cleaning gets you in the perfect mindset to tackle site optimization. Here are a few ways to seize the moment and make sure your site is shipshape for sales.

Test your site’s loading speeds.

Slow-loading pages are one of the top reasons visitors abandon a site prematurely. Test your site on Pingdom or Google PageSpeed and get a readout of which factors are causing slowdowns. Speeding up your pages could be as easy as resizing images. If it requires code optimization, now’s the perfect time to lock down the resources to make those improvements.

Make sure your localization is end to end.

In ecommerce, details matter. Especially at checkout. It’s not only important to communicate to your customers in their own language, but it’s also important to display prices in their own currency. Have you implemented price localization as well? Offering a price that makes sense for customers in different countries – and taking care of the currency conversion for them – will make for a seamless purchase experience.  

Do a content audit.

Have you analyzed all of your site’s pages lately? Is your website’s content performing as well as it could? Performing a systematic inventory and evaluation of your site content will help you identify:

  • Any content that needs to be updated. Have your product specs changed? Maybe you’ve gone through a brand refresh. Now is the time to comb through everything and make sure everything is correct.
  • Content that is no longer useful and can be removed. If your strategy has changed and you no longer target a particular audience, it’s time to take down those landing pages and update your copy elsewhere accordingly.
  • Content gaps you need to fill. Dig into your traffic from organic search. Make sure your content is adequately responding to people’s queries. If it’s not, that’s a huge opportunity: take advantage of it with new content.
  • Whether pages are ranking for your priority keywords. There’s always room for improvement. Tools like Google Search Console can show you how your content is performing in Google Search.

 

This process can take time, but it’s worth it. A content audit is a fundamental piece of optimization, which should really be a continuous process. And getting organized with an audit makes it even easier to quickly keep your site up to date as changes in your business inevitably happen.

Optimize your product pages.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to do a comprehensive content audit of your site, it’s worthwhile to at least take a fresh look at your product pages. Are your product descriptions up to date? Does your copy speak enough about benefits instead of features? Make sure your imagery is current. If you sell a software product, update any screenshots so you’re showing the most recent version of your product. If you use stock photography, invest in some new photos, as those styles pass quickly out of date. It’s incredible what updating a couple of images can do for a page.

Review the data.

And finally, any good bout of spring cleaning must involve a deep dig into the data. The post-holiday calm is the perfect time to review the performance of all your marketing channels – email, digital ads, webinars, social, events – and see what’s a priority for optimization or elimination. Of course, performance can fluctuate in channels for many reasons – and often, decreased performance means you simply need to reevaluate content, spend, or approach. But if you see sustained contraction in a channel over time, it might be time to cut back and “declutter” your marketing plan.  

With the Google Analytics and FastSpring WordPress plugin, you can view integrated ecommerce reports to see if there are any trends in sales. Is there a spike during certain times of the year? Are you seeing increased traffic from certain sources? Now is the time to pinpoint those trends and plan out strategic marketing campaigns that will maximize conversions.