You’re ready to optimize your website but the timing couldn’t be worse for a big business development project.

The budgets not quite there. Your schedule is just too packed. You don’t have the time to work with a contractor, provide feedback, and feel confident in the result.

I hear this every so often from founders and teams who want to feel confident in their website but don’t have the capacity to work with a freelancer like myself at that exact moment.

Sometimes, the timing just isn’t quite right for a big project like a new-and-improved website. But that doesn’t mean you just ignore your outdated website!

Thankfully, there are some really impactful steps you can take to refresh your website, feel much more confident sharing your link with leads, and save the full update project for when you have the capacity and budget.

How To Know You’re Ready To Optimize Your Website

The signs you’re ready to refresh your website are varied — but the most obvious one is when you stop feeling proud to share your site with leads and you don’t get excited about people landing on your homepage. 

That’s the obvious sign. When you start to feel this way, the time may be right to reach out to a website partner (your developer/agency/designer/freelancer) to have a discussion about refreshing your site.

A website optimization or ‘refresh’ doesn’t always mean starting from scratch, but it does take some dedicated time to strategize about what needs to be updated and a competent website partner to make it happen.

The other time you may be ready to optimize your website is when you have business updates that are not reflected on your current site. If you have new services, testimonials, project results, a new sector you’re targeting, new team members… The list goes on.

And the last sign you’re ready for a refresh? It’s been a while! Our websites are living, breathing digital homes for our business and when it’s been 6-12 months since anything has been updated, that’s usually a good sign to dedicate a couple of hours to adding updated content and other refreshes.

Update Your Website In One Hour (Ish)

To keep your website up to date without the pressure of a full-scale website project, I put together these handy, one-hour (ish) ways to refresh your website and feel more confident in what you present online…

Change Out Your Testimonials

Such a small, manageable action step that can make a huge difference! Choose current testimonials that highlight the results you brought to your past clients. If it’s been a while, follow up with past clients and ask about a quick testimonial.

If you have new Google Reviews, try adding some of these to your website in standout sections that showcase the impact you’ve had with these clients. This can be a great way to optimize your website with very minimal time.

Switch Your Featured Client Logos

This is also a good opportunity to update the logos you feature on your site that showcase your clientele. Try to select recognizable or relevant clients that will help you build trust and attract right-fit new clients.

Assessing your featured client logos (or awards, featured publications, etc.) is a perfect time to analyze the clientele that will appeal to your ideal clients. 

For example, I helped a client switch out some of their featured client logos to focus on more of the Canadian businesses they’ve worked with as they’re looking to establish themselves as a trusted partner for Canadian brands.

Add New Blog Posts

This will likely take longer than an hour, but WELL worth the time. Adding new content to your website will help your SEO rankings, user experience, and give you more content to repurpose across other marketing channels.

To make this process go a little bit faster, try having Claude.ai draft a rough outline for you to structure your thoughts around a specific topic. That way your blog creation process will be kick started and you’ll have more time for the actual content writing and revising.

Write Updated Case Studies

This gets left at the bottom of the list all too often (it’s a struggle!) but case studies are such a great way to have current client results easily accessible on your website.

To write impactful case studies, use the structure below and try to interview clients for 10-15 minutes to gather any insights and testimonials from their experience working with you.

• Overview of your client and the project.
• The challenge you set out to solve.
• The solution (your process/service).
• Highlights from the project.
• Results (data points) and testimonials.
• A call to action for working with you.

Update Data Points Or Results

If you have any data points, graphics, or results (before and afters, portfolio pieces) on your website, take an hour to get them up to date and you’ll feel SO much better about leads landing on your website.

Review Your Page Titles & SEO Descriptions

Sometimes pages get added and page titles or meta descriptions could get missed — reviewing titles and descriptions for your SEO foundations makes a big difference to your search engine rankings without taking a lot of time.

This is also a great time to look at key phrases or topics you may be missing from your website and want to write some blog posts and create some pages around.

Change Up Brand Imagery

One of the most visually impactful ways to refresh your website is new photography. If you’ve done a brand photoshoot or maybe found some much more on-brand stock imagery, this is a great step to elevate your site.

If you’re looking for great stock photography that doesn’t feel like stock photography, check out this blog post where I shared my top sources for free, cool stock imagery.

Write New Header Copy

Headers are the areas of your website copy that are read the most. Not everyone will read through every word of your site, but headers will almost always get skimmed so they’re a very impactful part of your website copy.

Review the main pages of your website and analyze your header copy to see if there are any phrases or sentences that could be revised to better represent your business and services. This is a great one to do one page at a time to make it more doable!

Be Strategic With Your Website Updates

As you review your website and dedicate an hour at a time to get optimize your website in a manageable way, keep your overall strategy in mind throughout each step. You don’t want to go into any of these updates and make changes willy nilly.

Review your marketing strategy, your brand guidelines, and your business plan so each update you make to optimize your website is done with care and strategy.

And if you DO want a website refresh to update ALL of these areas and more, inquire with me here to chat about working together!