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Dear Website Manager: Does this sound familiar?

  • You look at the calendar and see the end of the business year is fast approaching.
  • You check your expense budget and see you have a few thousand dollars left in your account for “Website Maintenance & Improvements.”
  • You check with the finance director, who says “use it or lose it,” because this year’s savings aren’t guaranteed to carry over into next year’s operating plan.
  • You realize you have about a month to find a smart way to spend those funds, and you don’t know where to begin. After all, what can you do to improve your website with only a few weeks and a few grand to invest?

As it turns out, quite a lot, including updates that can immediately enhance your users’ experience and make your site more secure and performant, as well as assessments you can do before year’s end to help strategically plan for future web projects. 

If you’re in this situation, we’ve compiled a handy list of ideas – all within the target price range – to use as a starting point:

10 Ideas to Improve Your Website for $5K or Less

  1. User Experience (UX) / User Interface (UI) Enhancements
  2. Content Refresh / New Content Development
  3. Accessibility Audit
  4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Enhancements
  5. Performance Optimization
  6. Analytics Optimization and Tracking Enhancements
  7. Content Management System (CMS) Updates
  8. Security Upgrades
  9. Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning
  10. Training and Documentation

1. User Experience (UX) / User Interface (UI) Enhancements

One sure-fire way to improve your website is to fine tune its existing UX and UI features, as site visitors will quickly notice and appreciate those updates. 

For instance, is your website responsive in the way it appears on both desktop and mobile screens, including portal pages into a members-only section or an online store? When did you last inspect your site’s primary and secondary navigation? Would retooling or streaming your menu systems help users find information faster and keep them in your site longer? Have you considered A/B testing key sections of your website to determine which page layouts, workflows, marketing copy, supporting visuals, and calls-to-action best incentivizes your core audience to convert?

Auditing your site for any of these UX / UI issues and addressing the ones you find is a great way to invest a little time and money on improvements that will pay big dividends for your users.

2. Content Refresh / New Content Development

Have you been meaning to add a blog or “in the news” section to your website? What about an area highlighting client success stories? When’s the last time you updated all of those backlinks in the articles you posted a few years ago, or updated headshots and bios for your management team?  Would your home page benefit from new header artwork, a rotating photo gallery, or a video section? How about branded infographics to help make the case for your next fund-raising campaign? 

Keeping evergreen website content up to date and relevant is always a priority. If your current material isn’t so current, consider spending some rainy day money to refresh the written and multimedia content that tells your story and sells your products, services, and mission.

3. Accessibility Audit

Ensuring everyone can access, utilize, and enjoy your website content is no longer a just goal for website managers. In many cases, it’s a legal requirement.

When’s the last time you scored your website on its accessibility for users who may need certain accommodations to experience all of your content, including the tools to navigate from page to page if using a mouse or trackpad isn’t an option? Have you kept current with federal guidelines to ensure your website is ADA / WCAG compliant?

Our crew conducts regular accessibility audits for our client-partners’ websites to help them remain compliant, make necessary updates, and stay educated on the ever-evolving government recommendations. One of the tools we use is Acquia Optimize (formerly Monsido). We can perform a thorough audit of your site and provide you with an action plan for improvement, so you have a blueprint to reference going forward. 

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Enhancements

Conducting a yearly SEO audit of your website is like getting your annual physical: You may not look forward to it, but you’re always glad you had it done.

Scheduling an annual SEO checkup to identify and fix issues affecting your site’s search ranking, including page title and meta tags, header structures, and keyword optimization, is more important than ever – especially with Google’s new AI-infused Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It’s also important to update your existing website content to align with ever-evolving SEO best practices.

NOTE: Our crew recently worked with our partners at Fire&Spark to complete an SEO audit of the Culture Foundry website. The process gave us important insights into sections of our site that needed attention – or further content development – and a helpful to-do list. The cost of the audit fits the budget amount contemplated in this article.

5. Performance Optimization

An SEO audit will likely raise some issues related to your website’s performance stats. If you see that “site speed” has been flagged as a problem, consider investing some web development funds to optimize your images, leverage browser caching, and minimize the amount of code on your website. Any content that bloats your site unnecessarily without being essential to its functionality risks slowing it down and impeding its performance.

Another way to approach this issue is through the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Services like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront distribute content more efficiently over a delivery network, which reduces latency and improves load times for users across different regions. If your site serves audiences around the world, integrating a CDN into your content delivery system is definitely worth a look.

6. Analytics Optimization and Tracking Enhancements

To add to the list of annual audits worth considering is one that takes stock of your current website analytics tools, whether you’re using free Google Analytics products, or paying for a subscription service.

Our crew has learned a lot from our partners at Optizent, as we’ve asked them to consult on advanced analytics set ups for Culture Foundry clients with complex ecommerce websites. Asking for help to configure your GA4 property, generate custom reports, create dashboards, and confirm conversion tracking – whether that means newsletter sign ups, whitepaper downloads, or ticket purchases – saves a lot of time and means you don’t have to DIY it (and hope you did it right).

The analytics experts at Optizent can also set up tracking for key performance indicators to measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns and how users are engaging with the  digital content you’re producing. 

7. Content Management System (CMS) Updates

While investing time and money to upgrade your website CMS to the latest software version may not be noticed by your external users, your internal site managers will appreciate it. Regular CMS platform updates keep your site secure and performing at its best. You may also benefit from new features introduced with the most-recent release.

Depending on the CMS software you’re using, this may also mean updating associated themes and plugins to ensure everything supporting your site is compatible. CMS updates may not be the most exciting item on your wish list, but it’s important housekeeping to conduct on a regular basis and will likely fall within the amount of budget money you have left to spend this year on web maintenance.

8. Security Upgrades

Your internal IT and/or DevOps team may lobby for these upgrades if they’re needed and your left-over funds can cover them:

9. Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning

While we’re discussing IT priorities, let’s add automated backup solutions and disaster recovery plan development to the list.

Given the number of unexpected disasters that have affected businesses across the country – from forest fires and super storms to power grid failures and data breaches – being able to automatically backup and easily recover your customer data, along with the content of your website, is vital to your business operations, customer relationships, and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Your website is the digital front door to your organization, and the data that runs through it is a critical asset to safeguard through the use of technology and prudent business practices.

10. Training and Documentation

Tied to all of the above items is good training and documentation for the team tasked with managing your website. 

Too often organizations invest handsomely designing and building a website, and then spend almost nothing making sure staff members know how to use it. To make matters worse, they may fail to document that knowledge so it’s passed on as turnover happens or roles change.

A few thousand dollars can cover staff training (or retraining) sessions that will get your website managers up to speed on the latest web management tools and best practices for creating and publishing content that converts.

Similarly, developing and maintaining official guides and/or documentation for your website management processes helps your team work efficiently and consistently, especially if responsibility for managing the website rests with multiple departments.

Conclusion

If you’ve got website money left to spend this budget cycle, don’t let it go to waste. The list above is a starting point for affordable updates you can make now or audits you can conduct to inform bigger web design and development projects down the road.

It doesn’t take a fortune to improve your website in ways that your users will notice and your web team will appreciate. If you need help taking stock of your site, so you know what to prioritize with what’s left of this year’s website budget, our crew is ready to assist and provide the analysis and advice you need.

Want to Improve Your Website for $5K or Less?

If you’re in the market for a brainstorming partner, count us in! We’re happy to share guidance on how to act quickly on any of the ideas listed above, or others you have.

Submit the form below so we know how to reach you, and a member of our team will be in touch.

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