Putting the Cart Before the Horse: Don’t Launch a Social Media Campaign Without These Website Cleanup Tips
Launching a social media campaign without first ensuring your website is in top shape is like putting the cart before the horse. Imagine driving traffic to a site that’s slow, cluttered, or outdated—it’s a surefire way to lose potential clients before they even get a chance to see what you have to offer. Before you hit that “post” button, take a step back and make sure your website is ready to impress. What are some essential website cleanup tips that will set the stage for a successful social media campaign?
Whether you plan to ramp up your presence on social media, start sending an email newsletter, begin blogging, or take any marketing initiative, first check your website. Websites should be in a constant state of iteration, not a one and done. Website features, functions, and design are like fashion – ever evolving. You don’t need to be on the cutting edge of website design but there are several elements to consider and update before you send people looking for you and your website.
Your Raison d’Etre
If your website does not help to answer the questions “what problem(s) do you solve and for whom?” you have an opportunity to work on messaging so that is immediately clear to the website visitor. This article from Forbes Advisor “Law Firm Website Design Best Practices & Examples” points out that you have 0.05 seconds to capture the interest of a website visitor before they click away. Be aware that many website visitors will be led directly to an inner page of your website, never landing on the home page. Make sure your website navigation is readily available on every page.
Call To Action
When someone visits your website what do you want them to do? Contact your firm? Make that easy by putting your contact form, phone number, address, appointment bookings link or any other way you want people to get in touch. Do not make visitors to have to dig around your site to find contact information. Put it in your header, a dedicated contact page, and in your footer.
Accessible
Make sure your website is designed with accessibility in mind. You can check the accessibility of your website using the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. If you will need to make some significant changes to your site to get it aligned with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, you can start with some small changes, such as ensuring that images on your website contain alt tags, that text is high contrast and large enough, video content has closed captions or transcripts, and that site navigation can be achieved with and without a mouse.
Security
Even if you are not selling anything on your website, it needs to be secure. If isn’t then when the site is rendered in a browser the visitor will get a warning “not secure”. In some cases, depending on the visitor’s environment, access to your website will be altogether blocked. If you are not sure if your website is secure, just check for the lock icon in the address bar of the browser, or check using this free website safety and security checking tool from SSL Trust. If you have applied patches and updates to your website, just like any technology, you are putting your site and your visitors at risk. Update and patch your WordPress site if you have one!
Accuracy and Currency
Check your website for out-of-date information, including contact information, support team and attorney listings, address, and practice areas. Beyond that, if you have information on your site such as articles, blog posts, and links make sure those are still applicable and live. You can use this Broken Link Checker from ahrefs to check broken inbound and outbound links for free. Content about the law and legal matters should always have a date, which will help you remember to check the content and help your visitor know when it was posted.
404 Errors
Check every single page of your website to make sure it works. No one likes the experience of clicking on a link to find a “404 – Page Not Found” error. Equally important is that if you created a “page under construction” take it down. You can hide it from your site while you work on it, but many times the empty promise is more an indicator of a good intention never realized.
Load Times and Mobility
People will be visiting your website from a mobile device. Current thinking is that website design is actually “mobile first”. If your website doesn’t render well or quickly on a mobile device, it is time to have your website redone. In the past a stop gap was put into place to redirect your website to a “m.dot” mobile version of a website. Google’s algorithm downgrades sites that do not render on mobile, even with the m.dot redirect. Even in a full web browser, if your website does not load quickly, you will lose visitors. You can test your website’s load speed at PageSpeed Insights and the mobile friendliness of your website at SEOmator.
Legally Speaking
If your website has a copyright notice in the footer from any year other than the current one, it is time to update it. Does your site have a privacy statement? Disclaimers? Review your site to make sure that you and your visitors are up to date and well educated about use of your site. Additionally, review images used on your website for licensing and copyright permissions.
Conclusion
If your firm’s digital marketing is a wagon wheel, your website is the hub with the spokes consisting of your social media, articles, search results, directory listings, reviews, and other assets. All of the spokes lead back to your website. Unlike search engine results, review sites, social posts, and other information about you and your firm on the web, you have full control over your website and its content. Make sure that your site is a positive reflection of your firm.
For Further Reading
Moving Your Email Address to a Professional Domain – North Carolina Bar Association
Do You Own Your Firm’s Web Presence? – North Carolina Bar Association
Checklist: Essential Elements of Law Firm Websites – North Carolina Bar Association
Ethical Considerations for NC Law Firm Websites* – North Carolina Bar Association
Law Firm Website Design Best Practices & Examples – Forbes Advisor
Attorney Bio | 7 Steps to a Make Your Bio Authentic and Fresh
Not Terribly Technical Tools for Your Law Firm Website – North Carolina Bar Association
Tech Tools To Help With DEI – North Carolina Bar Association
The ADA and Website Accessibility – Legal Environment and Best Practices – North Carolina Bar Association