2019 Online Marketing Housekeeping

As we approach the new year, it’s always a good time to do a bit of online housekeeping and make sure you’re ready for the January rush. Today we’ll talk about 5 quick fixes for your online marketing systems that can help you get 2019 started on the right foot.

1. Update Copyright Dates

This is a very quick fix, and while it’s not a critical issue, it’s something that needs to be done. Think of it like making your bed in the morning; it’ll set the tone for the year, and let your website visitors know you’re on top of your online presence.

You really don’t even need to have copyright dates on your site, but if you have them, you need to keep them update. Letting these get out of date displays an inattention to detail that many clients want to avoid when hiring an attorney.

There are plugins that do this automatically, and I’d definitely recommend implementing one of these on your WordPress site. If not, all you need to do here is update the copyright date on your site’s footer and on any landing pages set up with 3rd party services (Leadpages, etc.).

2. Improve Mobile Site Speed

Mobile traffic already accounts for the majority of internet traffic, and it probably accounts for the majority of your site’s traffic too. User attention spans on mobile are typically much shorter than on desktop or even tablet, so it’s critical to get your site’s mobile load time optimized.

Before you make any changes, run a quick test with Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix. Run the tests on both systems and compare the notes they give you — you may also want to run the tests a couple times and see if the results change (they aren’t always consistent). The reason we run the tests on two systems is really just to verify the data. There are a bunch of variables in those testing systems, so we don’t want to rely on just one dataset.

PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix will recommend a long list of changes depending on their analysis of your site, and running down that list is the best place to start. These results will vary from site to site, so I’ll just touch on a couple of basic places where you can pick up a lot of site speed.

• Code optimization - Using a plugin like WP Rocket to minify HTML/CSS and Javascript can significantly speed up load times, and leveraging their other features can provide additional gains.
• Image optimization - WP Rocket offers integration with Imagify to handle image compression, but there are a ton of services that do this just as well or better.
• CDN & Caching - Leveraging a content delivery network can make a big impact if your server and users aren’t close to each other, and caching can improve page load times across the board.