How to redo your website without getting a whole new website.

So you have a website that’s not helping your business much but you don’t have the money to totally redo it yet. Did you know the typical life expectancy of a website is 2 years? Most of us can’t afford to get a new website every 2 years. So here are some things you can do today to give your website a makeover, even if it’s 10 years old.

1) Redo the optin/free gift. Is it still relevant to today’s client? When is the last time someone signed up? Is it in the sidebar, top right? Try putting it just below the header and stretch it the width of the page.

2) Replace your clickable email address and phone numbers. In the old days we thought we had to have every way we can be contacted on our websites or we’d lose business. This may or may not have been true back then, but it’s not true now. Yes, it’s good to have a few ways to be contacted but do you really want to be tracked down?

Wherever you have a phone number, replace it with an online scheduler. And wherever you have a clickable email link, you can replace it with a link to your contact form. Now more than ever you need to protect your contact info. But also, you are probably busier than ever and contact forms and online schedulers help you create time boundaries.

3) 2005 called and they want their sidebars back. Nothing says “dated” like a boxy sidebar. Some websites do use sidebars nowadays but on an old website, the width and things on it scream “dated”. Most older websites are thin to begin with and the old sidebar takes up valuable real estate.

4) Cull the information on the home page. In the early days we put a lot of information on the home page for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Can you condense that information with more pictures and sub-headlines and less words?

5) Redo your fonts. And most likely, make them larger – to about 16px or 18px depending on the font. Google has some great free fonts that you can use and that are already installed on most computers. https://fonts.google.com/

6) Replace your slideshow with an updated static image. Nobody reads them anyway.

7) Take any info about you and move it to the About Me page. Most of us have already done that but there are a few stragglers out there who still have a bit of your bio on the home page.

I hope some of these tips help you to freshen up your website until you are able to have it redone.

This is an important announcement that will affect your website so please read to the end.

Starting in Jan 2017 Google Chrome and Apple are requiring that all websites have https and not just http. If you do not have the https (SSL certificate) they are going to flag your site with an orange triangle that says “untrusted” when hovered over. (For the record, Firefox is already doing this.) So all your website visitors will see that your site is not secure, undermining the trust you are trying to build with them.

The reason they are doing this is to stop hackers. With http, every time you log into your website your username and password can be seen by people who know how to do that sort of thing (people like hackers). And if you have a membership site or any site where people use a username and password, their info is out there for the world to see, too, increasing your chances of being hacked. So Google is forcing us to secure our websites. It’s a good thing, actually.

I’ve been doing some research into this process. The toughness of setting it up depends on who you are hosting with.

Basically you (or I) need to install a program (script) called Let’s Encrypt on your server. Let’s Encrypt gives you a free SSL certificate. It’s the industry standard right now and completely trustworthy, which means you do not need to purchase an SSL certificate from your host – which saves you a hefty yearly fee.

Next, we install a plugin on your website which will go into your database and other private areas and change all the http to https. The plugin is Really Simple SSL which offers a free version and also a premium version. If you have people other than yourself and your team logging into your site, such as a membership site, then you may want to go with the paid version (a very inexpensive one-time fee) to heighten your level of security.

Lastly we need to make sure all your images on your site say https://yoursite.com/imagename and not http://. This includes the images that make up the design of your site as well as images you’ve added such as in a blog post. Even one image without the https will trip the “untrusted” triangle for that page.

Some hosting companies have already adopted Let’s Encrypt so to activate it we check a button within your cpanel. Other hosts haven’t so we would need to install the script. Some hosting companies are still looking into this. They have to make sure this third party script is compatible with what they use so they are rightfully being cautious (they just need to be quicker about it, lol).

I gave you the instructions above but if you need help with this, you know you can contact me for help here.