Is your Website ready for the New Year?

I love the New Year with all of the promise that the 12 months to come brings! And it’s the perfect time to ensure that your website is up to scratch and ready for the world to see.

So, here are my Top tips to make sure that your website is up to date for 2025…

#1 Copyright Date

A quick win to start with – update your copyright date in the footer of your website to 2025.

If you don’t already have a copyright date set, then now is the perfect date to add one. You can simply add the current year, or to protect all of your content from the time you launched the site, I recommend adding a span of years to your site (e.g. © 2014 – 2025) to ensure that content is protected from the start date of your site. And don’t forget to add in your company or trading name too!

#2 Check for Errors

Is your website working correctly? Do you know how to check for errors?

Keeping on top of errors on your site is really important and I recommend repeating this task monthly, but the New Year is a great time to check for website errors to ensure that you don’t have any broken links or old content that is no longer relevant.

You can manually go through your site if you only have a few pages, or use an online error checking tool such as Google Webmaster Tools.

Whichever method you use, you should ensure that your check includes:

• broken internal and external links

• site speed

• mobile responsivity

• SEO errors (see point 6 for more details on this)

Each time you update your website and fix some errors, make sure you run another report and see what needs to be fixed next as your website will never be perfect but you can improve it every time!

#3 Update Products & Services

Are you offering something new for 2025?

The New Year is a great time to go through your website and update, tweak or remove your products and services to match your 2025 goals.

#5 Publish a Blog Post

Whether you are new to blogging or an old hand, adding new posts to your website regularly is a great way to keep your website up to date without changing other content.

Think about the questions you get asked about most often and write regular posts addressing those common problems – it’s a great way to keep visitors returning to your site and gives you more scope for adding keywords and useful information to your website, and also creates a resource of posts for you to share on your social media channels!

#6 SEO Check & Update

SEO (search engine optimisation) is a task that really should be on your monthly list for website updates as you need to ensure that you keep an eye on your keywords and what’s actually working.

Depending on the platform you host your website on, this will be a slightly different process. But it’s important to keep on top of SEO tasks and make sure you go back through your website. 

#7 Google Tools

Not really an update as such, but as with SEO, keeping an eye on your Google tools will help you to understand where visitors are coming from and how they are finding your website.

Check Google Analytics and Google Search Console and make sure these are connected correctly to your site – and if you haven’t installed or used these free tools before, make 2025 the year that you get to grips with them and add them to your website.

I also recommend creating a Google Business Profile (previously Google My Business) account if you don’t have one, or updating it with new information about your products and/or services for 2025. It’s great for local businesses, but don’t discount it if you have a service area rather than a physical location as it can be useful for all small businesses.

You can read more about Google Business Profile in my blog post here.

bonus tip – create a monthly action plan 

OK, so it’s not an actual website update, but planning dates for your updates each month NOW is a great way to ensure that you keep on top of all of your website tasks throughout the year.

I generally plan these for the middle of each month for my own website as my end/start of month is really busy with client work, but do whatever works best for you. Make sure you diarise the changes and check on your SEO, website content and blog posts at least once a month to keep on top of them throughout the year.

So, is your website ready for the New Year?