Hello and welcome back to the Messy Mompreneur podcast! I’m your host, Alysha Sanford, and I’m so happy to have you here.

Before the busy holiday season hits, let’s make sure your website is ready to convert visitors into clients — not lose them to broken links or outdated info. In this episode, I walk you through a quick five-step website audit you can do in under an hour to keep your site polished, professional, and ready for holiday traffic.

We’ll cover what to check, refresh, and simplify across your essentials, tech setup, visuals, and content — so your website continues working for you while you focus on motherhood, homemaking, and running your small business with ease.

Main Topics included in this Episode

  • The 5-step website audit for small business owners
  • What to update: contact info, links, and pricing
  • Quick fixes for speed, SEO, and mobile-friendliness
  • Simple ways to refresh visuals and calls-to-action
  • Traffic drivers that bring people back to your digital home
  • Why a fall refresh saves time (and stress) during the holidays

Resources Mentioned

  • “The Friday Mix" sign up (A weekly newsletter with a mix of tips, insights, recent favorites, tools and resources that I don’t want to keep from you!)

Connect with Alysha

Music Licensing Info

Music by Eli Lev - Dancin' on the Lawn

Link

Episode Transcription

Hello and welcome back to the Messy Mompreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Alysha Sanford, and I'm so happy to have you here. Imagine it's Black Friday and you've rolled out a promo and someone comes to your site only to find outdated pricing, broken links, or old contact info. All of the momentum just gone. Before you sprint into the holiday season, let me help you to pause and polish your website so that it works for you and not against you. If you listened to the last episode, that I believe your website is your digital home base, but it's not a set it and forget it. Seasons shift, your offers evolve, and your audience changes. So today I want you to walk away with a simple, powerful checklist that you can run through in an hour or less so that your site is polished and ready before the holiday rush hits. Okay, so if you stick around and keep listening, what you'll get in this episode is a five-step audit for your essentials, tech, messaging, traffic, and content, some real examples and things that I see go wrong, actionable tips that you can do today, and some bonus encouragement for making the audit manageable in a busy season. So step one is to confirm the essentials. You'll start with your contact info and business details. Check your phone, e-mail, hours if applicable. Are they up to date? Someone might find you at odd hours during holidays. Test your links. Click through every link, menus, buttons in your footer. Do they go where you think? A tip is to use a broken link checker tool for a quick scan. And then your services, products, and pricing. Are your offers still accurate? Did anything change? Don't confuse your potential client. If you changed prices or retired a package, you got to update it. Step 2 is to check your technical foundations. Start with your Google search console for indexing. Is your site submitted? Are pages being indexed? If you post new stuff, are those pages showing up in search? If not, submit your site map and check your coverage issues. Google Search Console is free. And your loading speed and performance, you can test via Page Speed or another speed tool. If it's slow, people will bounce. And a tip is to compress images, avoid heavy autoplay videos, and limit animations. That'll increase your speed. Mobile responsiveness. Open your site on your phone. Does something look wonky? Buttons misaligned? Text too small? I would, I think it's safe to say that most people are shopping or searching on their phone these days. So you need to make sure it's optimized for mobile users. Step 3 is to update your messaging and visuals. Swap in some fresh visuals. It could just be one to two on the homepage with a seasonal feel. If you don't have any new brand photos, you could rotate in client or product images. Review, copy, and adjustments. Your About page, your Services page, do they still reflect who you are today? Even small tweaks. Peaks in tone can make it feel fresh. And your calls to action. Do your buttons reflect your current top priority? Change learn more to book now or get your holiday guide for something more direct. Test the links behind the CTAs to make sure that they lead to the right page. Step 4 is to audit your traffic drivers. Pinterest is a visual search engine. Design a few pins with fall vibes if you want. Linking to fresh blog posts or your services. You can batch them in Canva and make sure to use keywords in your pins. Your Google Business Profile and local presence. You can update your hours, add a fall post, upload a current image if it's relevant. Not everybody is on social media, so Google Business Profile is a huge asset. for those who can't log in and find your information. And your social media links and links in bios. Ensure that your bio links to your website or landing pages are working and not a disconnected profile. And your e-mail signature. This seems small, but adding your website, offer, or freebie link to your signature pushes daily traffic and makes it even quicker for your customers to find what you want them to. Step 5 is to review your content library. You can refresh older posts. It's easy to do that for blog posts. So you can pick one, update the tips, refresh images, adjust wording to the seasonality. Google tends to favor updated content. You can plan a heavy hitter post. Create one to two big SEO-focused posts for the fall or holiday season, topics that your audience is already asking. And cross-linking, link-related posts, your services, your freebies. The longer you can keep someone on your site, the better. All right, so key takeaways, I'm trying to keep this short for you because I know you're busy. I want you to remember that your website can't wait until it breaks. Seasonal audits prevent scrambling and lost sales. Small updates, so images, calls to action, contact info, often make a huge difference. The technical stuff matters. Loading speed and mobile friendly and indexing. Traffic tools, so e-mail, Pinterest, links, should send people back home to your site, your home base. and your content library is a treasure. Treat it, refresh it, and link within it. I know this time of year feels like a sprint after sprint, but your website deserves the refresh, and if you take an hour now, you'll save dozens later. Pick one of these steps. You don't have to do all 5 today. Just start somewhere. Your website is your digital home base for your business. Let's make sure it's welcoming, polished, and ready for you and your people as you step into the busiest season of the year. All right, thanks for being here. Until next time. Bye.