Is your website stuck in the 00s? Was it brilliant when you built it but now it’s a little lackluster? Did it create leads at first but now users are bouncing out as soon as they arrive? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it might be time for a refresh or even an entire overhaul.

If you’ve committed to a complete overhaul, then you probably have some inkling about what you want to improve. However, you should still audit your site to diagnose issues you might not be aware of. By analyzing key metrics like traffic, conversions, bounce rate, and time on page, you’ll be able to understand what pages people find useful, what pages might be missing, and what pages you can remove. Then, ask yourself:

Provide high-quality content that’s relevant to your target’s needs and that’s informative and unique. Including calls-to-action on every page will lead users through your site and encourage conversion. Consider providing a sign-up form and reward people with regular, informative newsletters. This can be a valuable way to engage with your audience—that is, if you don’t let that list collect dust.

Regularly publishing new content will keep your audience engaged and returning to your site. A great way to do this is with monthly (at the very least) blog posts, which is also a great excuse for posting to your other marketing channels, such as banners, social, and email. Events and marketing pushes are another way to update your site.

Implementing a strong SEO strategy is critical when it comes to attracting new visitors. Google accounts for a variety of factors, including keywords, link equity, and social signals. Start with keyword research to identify unique keywords relevant to each page. These keywords should be used naturally in your titles, headers, body content, anchor text, alt image tags, HTML tags, meta tags, and title tags. Platforms like Semrush, Screaming Frog, and Google Search Console can help identify any issues with SEO on your site.

Optimizing for performance can help with SEO and is an important part of the user experience. People don’t notice much when a website is fast, but they definitely notice when it’s slow, and that can have a negative impact on your brand. PageSpeed Insights is a good tool for testing performance.

These days, most people use their smartphones and tablets to browse the Web, so your site needs to load and display properly no matter how small the screen. The easiest way to make sure your site is mobile-friendly is by using a responsive design. You can check whether your site is optimized for mobile with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Accessibility is not only an important legal issue these days, but making a site accessible to the visually and physically impaired also improves SEO. WAVE® is a great accessibility testing tool.

Who has the password to this, that, and the other? How many times have analytics data and other resources been lost because no one knows who owns the account? Gather your passwords (securely) in one place! Is your development company your partner or your bully? Make sure you have the keys to everything so you’re empowered, not locked out.

Even if they aren’t in a position to use analytics now, I urge clients to start collecting data so they’ll be able to use it later. If you’re planning a redesign at some point in the future, having that data from the previous site can tell you whether your investment was a success. Same regarding email campaigns. When it comes to tracking visitor behavior and evaluating and planning site changes, Heat Maps can be a powerful tool. We can record real user interactions on the site to see what’s working and what isn’t. And don’t forget your UTM parameters to track the effectiveness of your online campaigns!

How does it reflect on your brand if your site gets hacked or if it crashes? What if you literally lose your whole site because you don’t have it backed up? In addition to hardening your site against bots and hackers (firewall, spam blocker, login secured, etc.), I recommend: