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New Year’s Website Resolutions: January Tune-Ups That Pay Off All Year

An agenda open on a desk with "Happy New Year!" written on the middle of the right page in black ink. A black pen sits next to the agenda.

A new year often encourages many of us to reflect and make some kind of positive change, whether it’s to exercise more regularly, give ourselves more time for that hobby, learn a new skill, or stick to just one coffee in the morning. The annual changeover is also a great time to revitalize your website with the same kind of review and care. These January tune-ups can help maintain your website and will pay off all year.

Maintaining Website Functionality

New year website maintenance is an excellent chance to ensure your website’s general functionality. You want to make sure your website works properly to give the best impression to potential clients and customers. A dysfunctional website could send the opposite message. Here are some simple but effective January tune-ups for to ensure your website’s functionality:

  • Pages and their assets load: Every webpage loading with all its assets is essential functionality. Ensuring pages, text, images, videos, etc. load correctly by browsing through each page is an excellent way to ensure functionality for the new year.
  • Keeping things speedy: Along with everything loading correctly on your website, everything should also load quickly. Websites that take longer to load easily lose their visitors and are deprioritized in search results. Google has an easy tool that can help you check your website’s speed. One effective way to reduce load times is to optimize your image sizes, since bigger images take longer to download.
  • Check for broken links: The internet is not as stable as we’d like to think. Links regularly change, meaning old hyperlinks may suddenly lead nowhere. These could be links leading to other pages on your site or those leading to other websites. The latter group are especially likely to become broken as other websites remove pages or redesign their page structure. These broken links could frustrate users trying to navigate your site or create the wrong impression. Various tools can help parse through your website to ensure links aren’t broken.

 

Tuning Accessibility

Besides maintaining and tuning up general functionality for the new year, you should also review your website’s accessibility. Web accessibility is a requirement for any business with more than 50 employees in Ontario, and also a best practice since it allows the most people to use your website. Website accessibility is also not a “one and done” process, because the standards are continuously being revised and updated. While expert web designers will be most familiar with these best practices, there are also some you can begin to review this January:

  • Good alt-text on every image: Alt-text helps those with difficulty seeing get a better sense of what is being displayed in an image or graphic. This is essential for users to fully grasp what a page might be communicating, because otherwise a screen reader simply reads the image’s file name. Every image should have alt-text that accurately and fully describes its content. For example, include all objects and quote any text and its placement in the image.
  • Accessible font-choice: You want to ensure your website’s font is readable for all users to ensure maximum accessibility. This includes considering both the type of font and its size.
  • Colourblind friendly: Colourblindness is quite common and so is a key concern in website accessibility. If a graphic uses reds and greens, it may be indiscernible to someone with red-green colour deficiency. Using tools that visualize colourblindess can help identify potential issues on the website.

Checking Your Website’s Security

Another important maintenance routine that will prevent headaches throughout 2026 is to ensure your website is secure. There are few simple checks to perform in January that will help keep pesky hackers and malicious software from breaching your site:

  • Update, Update, Update: Keep your website and all of its plug-ins up to date. Older versions can leave security vulnerabilities that will leave your website vulnerable.
  • reCAPTCHA: A particular plug-in we want to highlight is Google’s reCaptcha. This service helps to keep your website secure from bots that can destabilize your website.
  • Checking for HTTPS: It is best practice today that websites use the HTTPS protocol to keep their pages more secure for their users. Reviewing settings can help to ensure this is being done.

 

Content Review

Some other new year’s maintenance that can take more time and effort is a content review of your site. This takes more time because it means looking through all the information provided on your site. This review helps to ensure information is up to date, such as your address or services/products provided. It also helps to identify outdated or now irrelevant information which no longer applies and could confuse visitors. These updates also improve your website’s SEO, since search engines review when web pages were last updated.

January Tune-Ups Pay Off All Year

Now you should have a good sense of the simple January maintenance that will set you up for a smooth new year. Various plug-ins and tools can help you perform any of these tune-ups, although content review or a formal website audit will require some more specialized knowledge and input. Either way, Rosewood Marketing’s web team will happily review and implement these tools or more generally assist with website tune-ups. If you’re interested in more comprehensive maintenance or a complete audit, our team is ready and happy to help you fully prepare for 2026.

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Time to Talk Tracking: Is Your Website Measuring What Really Matters?

A woman on a laptop with Google Analytics looking at the various metrics a business' website is measuring.

A business’ website does more than provide information to visitors. It also offers a lot of valuable information about these visitors to the business. This can include users’ interests, preferences, and certain demographics, but often that valuable data is missed or even ignored. It’s time to talk about website tracking. We’ll explain which website metrics are important, why they are insightful, and some of the best tools for gathering and measuring that information.

Why Website Metrics are Important to Track

Websites can collect a lot of data about how many visitors come to a website, from where, what pages they visit, how long they stay, and more. These can be extremely informative for a business. They can provide insights into customer/client interests, how they are navigating to your website, whether an audience is growing or cycling, and even strengths or weaknesses about the website design itself. Measuring these important metrics can provide great insight about your website’s design, the products/services you offer, and where you should focus digital marketing efforts.

Important Website Metrics to Measure

There are countless data points a website can measure, but they are not all created equal. Some are more important to measure and track than others. For example, ‘views’ is a simple metric to see how many people are viewing a business’ website and specific pages. However, it’s not much more informative than this. We’ll explain some of the key measurements that all businesses should be tracking.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is uniformly one of the most important metrics to track on a website to measure engagement. It considers what percentage of visitors to a business’ website convert, i.e. perform some kind of action. There are different kinds of conversions and yours will depend on the website and business. Conversion rate may consider completing purchases or booking appointments/service, but they can also be filling in a digital form, signing up to a newsletter or trial, or downloading content. All of these can be extremely informative about what is attracting visitors’ attentions and interests.

Event Tracking and Other Behaviour Measurements

Another important metric for measuring website visitor engagement is event tracking. Events can include conversions, but they also include other actions taken on a website. Event tracking can monitor users clicking on certain buttons or images, playing videos, opening a gallery, etc. All of this can provide important data for what parts of a website are attracting more attention, getting more conversions, and more. That can help a business know where to focus its service/product offerings and inform web designers about future revisions to the site’s layout.

Other event related metrics like average time per page (how long users are staying on pages) and average session length (how long users are staying on the website) can also be extremely informative both to a business and designers. For example, visitors may be staying on a page for a long time because of strong interest, but if it is a page designed to quickly redirect users to more specific products or pages, it may be due to confusion or too many options.

Traffic Sources

Today, most people don’t navigate to a new website by typing the URL into their browser’s address bar. Instead, most people are directed to a website from ads, social media, emails, blogs or even other websites. Measuring a website’s traffic’s sources helps determine where new and returning visitors are coming from, helping to determine which marketing is most effective and where a business can maintain and further grow its clientele. Inversely, it can also identify which channels might be lacking and if you need new marketing strategies.

Bounce Rate vs Engagement Rate

Another informative metric to measure and track is the bounce rate. This tracks how many visitors load a page on the website and then leave without clicking or interacting with anything on the site. This can indicate certain design elements are not grabbing attention or perhaps a certain page is causing more bounces than others.

Engagement Rate is the opposite of a bounce rate and a good measurement to compare with the bounce rate. The engagement rate tracks how many visit the website and interact with anything, including buttons, images, videos, etc. With the engagement and bounce rates together, a business can get a full sense of the impression its website provides.

Tools for Measuring your Website

All these metrics are important to track, but that may leave the question of how you measure them. Of course, there are countless tools and plug-ins available to help you track metrics. We’ll highlight a few standards.

Shopify Analytics

Shopify includes in its platform a dashboard which helps track various metrics about an ecommerce website. Along with some of the essential metrics we’ve mentioned, it also includes various business performance metrics that can help track both your website and ecommerce business.

MonsterInsights

WordPress does not offer a free built-in analytic dashboard like Shopify, but it does have a large suite of plug-ins. MonsterInsights is one of the more robust plug-ins and offers a wide range of tracking for a website along with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

Of course, the web giant Google provides its own web analytics platform that can track and measure a website’s various metrics. Google Analytics, part of Google’s large Marketing Platform, provides all these key metrics and also connects to other Google services, for an even fuller picture of all your digital marketing. Its services are also built into WordPress’ Premium plan, and Shopify sites can be connected to the platform.

Matomo

Another popular web analytics platform is Matomo. Along with a thorough set of analytics, Matomo is particularly popular for its data ownership policy and self-hosting option, allowing a business to keep the metric tracking in-house. Its WordPress plugin can make it an easy addition to any WordPress site.

Making Sense of the Metrics

Tracking and measuring key metrics of your website can be extremely informative. A key thing to remember when tracking these metrics is that they are numbers alone. Measurements mean nothing without careful analysis. For example, a click-rate could be high or low for various reasons. The metrics become even more informative when they are combined, e.g. observing that traffic coming from a certain source has higher engagement rates. Your web design and digital marketing team at Rosewood will have the expertise to identify the important metrics, understand what they mean, and turn them into actionable strategies for your business. If you’re ready to start tracking measurements and consider the invaluable data of your business’ website, contact Rosewood’s web team.

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Scalable by Design: Building a Website That Grows with You

Woman sitting outside leaning against a tree with a house in the background while she talks on the phone, pondering her website's scalable design

If you’re currently designing or redesigning your business’ website, you’re probably bogged down with a lot of decision-making and planning. One important strategy is to consider how your website will change as your business grows. This is why any business should build a website with a scalable design. That way, in a year or two from now, you won’t find yourself with another redesign and another whole swath of decisions and plans. We’ll explain what scalable design is and how you can ensure your business’ website is flexible for the future.

The Importance of Scalability

Designing a website is a costly endeavor in time, energy, and associated funds. That’s why you want to design a website with flexible functionality. A lot can change within a year or two for a business. Products, services, or content offered may double or even triple in that time. Each of these will require their own pages and media. The number of users may also steadily grow, demanding more on the hosting servers.

If a website has not been developed to easily scale, it will quickly experience growing pains. The website may become difficult to navigate, start to slow down, or even fail to load for users. This will mean a full redesign and the associated costs. However, building a website with growth in mind will allow the website to continue functioning optimally without needing an annual or biennial redesign. It also means all those new visitors won’t encounter a dysfunctional website that will damage the credibility of your business, but instead take comfort in the sleek user-experience they expected.

Website Scalability vs. Scale

Designing for scalability does not mean simply going overkill on your website’s resources, such as getting more servers or hosting resources right from the start. This is a difference between designing for scale and scalability. For example, it’s not efficient to pay for a scale of hosting services with resource limits designed to handle 1000 concurrent users, when the website averages a tenth of that. The same is true for data storage for your website. Scalability means ensuring these can be expanded when necessary. Thus, designing for scalability is efficient both in maintaining a design’s lifespan and in ROI.

Strategizing Scalability

Designing for scalability can be tricky. We can’t predict the future, and sometimes even the most reasoned anticipations fail. Nevertheless, there are many strategies and considerations that can help ensure a website will more easily grow for expanded functionality.

Scalable Website Structure

A website’s structure or the “sitemap” is a design’s backbone. It determines how pages are laid out. A logical and well-organized structure ensures that customers can more easily navigate around the website without getting lost. When designing this structure for scalability, consider how certain pages should be hierarchically organized. What are the overarching categories for the website, such as products, services, information, etc. How might these categories grow or need to be further subdivided? For example, there may be only a few individual products currently, but if those expand to ten, twenty, or even a hundred, the structure should be able to handle the addition of new categories so that navigation remains intuitive.

Scalable Features

A hierarchical organization is important for a website’s user experience and scalability. Just putting a list of 100 pages or products in front of a user will lead to confusion. Another scalability design tactic is considering features that can aid with scalability that help users narrow down material. For example, a filter function is excellent for scalable design. These use categories and tags assigned to products or pages to help users refine what they see. Just as you can design a scalable hierarchical website structure, you can design a scalable hierarchical set of filters which can also expand over time as more categories or tags need to be added.

Templates

It’s inevitable that a website will eventually add a new page or product. Designing that page from nothing takes considerable time. However, since websites are best made consistently, most product and content pages will be designed similar or even identical. This is why scalable designs use templates, and most web platforms offer templates such as WordPress and Shopify. These templates have a preset layout which allows a new page to be added much more quickly because the specific contents are put in place. For example, a product page template will only need the product and its details to generate the page according to the template. Uploading one, twenty, or two hundred products all at once will make no difference. These templates will have to be made when designing the website initially but will save far more time in the future.

Scalable Hosts

Another key decision when designing or redesigning for scalability is to pick a scalable web host. There are few things to consider when designing for scalability. First, look for a host that provides free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)/TLS (Transport Layer Security). These are essential for a website’s security. You will also want to look at the storage capacity provided at different plan tiers. Free hosting might provide ample storage space for now, but if your website surpasses that limit, how much will additional space cost? Similarly, check whether the host restricts the number of monthly visitors. Depending on your current website users and how fast it is growing, that also might limit how flexibly your website can scale.

The Scales of Flexible Design

Scalable web design may mean some more initial effort in a website’s design or redesign, but it saves much more time and resources in the future. It helps ensure an efficient and effective website for multiple years. Even with these key considerations we’ve discussed, there are other potential considerations for scalable and flexible web designs. If you’re curious about these other considerations, what web platforms or hosts would be suitable for your website, or want help in your new design, contact our web design team.

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