“I need help figuring out what to update on my website.”

Whether you’ve put your website to the side, added pages to it since it was last designed and now it feels a little off than when you first had it. I’m here to tell you that this feeling is completely normal. And yes, it’s also completely normal to feel like you just want to click ‘buy now’ on that new template. If it makes you feel better, I’ve done all of the above.

What I’ll write about here are simple ways to help you figure out what to update and how to get specific with the updates on your website so that you’re not doing more than you have time for.

Here’s how to figure out what to update on your website.

Start by describing how you feel when you are looking at your website. The two most often descriptors I hear when I’m on calls are these two: ‘busy’ and/or ‘not like themselves’ both. Another way to think about this is think about ‘how you want this to feel’.

Different questions but gets you to the same place.

So let’s start with one of the biggest complains “My website feels too busy”. To get from “busy” to a solution, you will need to do some investigation and here’s what I do. First, I try to figure out what type of word ‘busy’ is and it’s an adjective.

Ok this may sound like a grammar lesson but hang with me here. But maybe this might come naturally to you compared to me because English is not my first language. What I’m trying to say here is knowing that ‘busy’ is an adjective, this gives me a clue that I’m on the right track because websites are visual, so I need descriptors to describe the problem.

Figuring out the ‘how’

To figure out the how, you need to get specific. The analogy I like to use here is cooking. When you tasting your soup as you’re cooking, you might say “it’s tasteless”. But to figure out what you need to add, you need to get specific. You cannot add sugar when it needs salt, it doesn’t work. Well, unless you’re making pasta sauce - which I do add some chocolate into.

If you’re still following me, the next question to figure out is “what’s busy?”

Is it the amount of words? Is it the pages? Is it the photos?

Once you’ve identified what is busy, find the opposite of these descriptors and that’s your solution. For example: If the pages feel messy, the solution is to clean it up and this can be as simple as categorizing your current pages. If the words are busy, the fast solution is to break up the paragraphs. And maybe when you have the time, you can go back to the words and rewrite them. Remember, you don’t have to do everything all at once.

Still not sure, click the button below to download your website audit toolkit to help you figure out what to update.