WOTW Squarespace Spring Cleaning Checklist
Our official to-do list for sprucing up your website — no feather duster required.
Often when you think of spring cleaning, you think of scrubbing carpets, putting away winter clothes, or deep cleaning in areas you don’t normally touch. Your website on the other hand? We’re guessing not much comes to mind. But there is plenty to spring clean to ensure you have a great user experience while also making things easier on yourself.
Here’s our Squarespace Spring Cleaning checklist — no Swiffer or other cleaning supplies needed.
Tidy URLs
Definition: A URL that easily describes the title or contents of the page at a glance.
Tidy URL Example: https://www.weekofthewebsite.com/portfolio-content/category/Kishya+Greer
This URL at a glance is probably a portfolio page on our site. Oh, it is mine! How did that get there? (Feel free to click on it.) Clean URLs are a great way for people to know what they are getting into before clicking. It helps when sharing, too, and search engines love them. It makes the site much easier to crawl your site and pull keywords for indexing
This fix is easy to implement with Squarespace. Navigate to your “Pages” section and click the gear next to the page name. This will help you access the settings. Here in the “URL SLUG” section you can set the name of your page and hide 1 or two keywords here. In the example shown, you can see this is a blog page. The slug for this page is “graphic-design-blog-fort-worth-tx.” Keeping the slug short is best — 3-4 words tops if possible.
URL cleaning, CHECK!
Orderly Folders
Definition: Folders are what Squarespace calls its drop-down navigation. The drop-down is achieved by a folder containing pages or links. Tidying your folders is a simple fix.
Reevaluate your page names. Have you updated the content on the page? Is the name still applicable?
Page name length. The shorter, the better. Cut unnecessary words. Try “Contact” in place of “Contact Us.”
Evaluate the order. Think about user flow — are your pages telling the story you want?
Consolidation. Could a page be combined with another? A link in a folder can also point to a section of a page. Would nesting a form or your bios on another page be a better tactic for your audience?
Folder cleaning, CHECK!
Pristine Image Descriptions
Definition: A written caption that describes an image.
Clean image descriptions are important for screen readers for the visually impaired as well as for search engines. A big part of ensuring your website is ADA compliant is being descriptive of the images, charts, and icons. It’s recommended that image descriptions be 110 to 250 characters or less to ensure compatibility for screen readers. Think of it as a tweet: short and as descriptive as possible.
Example: Three young and happy Black men laughing on a sunny paved city street. All wearing hats, casual light jackets, and two with stylish sunglasses.
This is another great way to pump keywords into your page. You can also use the file name of the image as another area to describe your photos. “Photo-817-candid.jpg” is a lost opportunity. In Squarespace, once your photo is uploaded you can add your alt text and change your photo file name all in one area.
Clean Image Descriptions, CHECK!
BONUS: Content cleaning
While we’re in a cleaning mode, there is one additional area to scrub. While your site content may have been perfect on launch day, things change. Doing a quick edit of every section of your site is a must. Make sure you’re not leaving out crucial details, and think about what information prospects are looking for, as tweaking your content and adding clarity can could help save you time in the future. While you are in there, double-check your buttons and links to ensure they are all working.
Clean Content, CHECK!
Spring website cleaning is complete! You can rest easy knowing your website is helping you make a great first impression and informing your audience. Just like your living space, you should clean your site as often.
See you in the sunny website shine summer!
