We are now one week into the New Year, and at this point I would expect that everyone has made (or broken already) a few personal New Year’s Resolutions. It’s that magical time of the year where we dream of being productive, living a healthy lifestyle or some other random resolution to make this current year better than the last.

Your website is your home base for your online presence, so it makes sense that you should consider making a few website related New Year’s Resolutions. I could likely create a giant list of resolutions that could improve a website, but I chosen my top 3 to share.

1. Consider Deleting Your Blog

That’s right, I am suggesting that you delete your blog. Not everyone should do this, only a select few websites need to do this. Go to your blog and check when the last post was published. If you have not written a post in the last year, then you need to get rid of your blog.

Having blog posts that are more than a year old shows that you do not update your content regularly. If you do not update your blog content, then people may assume that your website content is also out of date. This could lead to the visitor not trusting your information and potentially turning to your competitors website.

2. Install Google Analytics

You shouldn’t make any website related decisions without consulting your website statistics. Making decisions without any statistical data is akin to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about your website including (but not limited to) number of visitors, geographic location of visitors, length of time spent on pages, top visited pages and so on.

To give you an idea of the power of Google Analytics, one of our ecommerce clients asked us to review their Google Analytics to determine if there were any opportunities to increase their profitability. The bWEST team reviewed the analytics and uncovered information that was able to save the company approximately $8,000 on an annual basis.

3. Setup on Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools is another program offered by Google that is extremely important to have installed on your website. In short Google Webmaster Tools provides details about your website’s visibility in Google as well as the “health” (page errors, malware, missing pages etc) of your website.

Webmaster Tools works quite well with Google Analytics to provide keyword data, and search engine rankings. Its a great place to gather data for any search engine optimization campaign.

Another great feature is the ability to receive email notifications whenever Google detects a problem with your website. For example if a page url has been changed and Google is no longer able to find the page, you would receive notification and be able to correct the problem quickly.

Time to take action

You make personal resolutions each and every New Year, so why not make a resolution for your website. It’s now time to review your website to determine if any of these resolutions can be applied to your website.

If you have made any website or business related New Year’s Resolutions please share in the comments below.