While we’re all well aware that the new financial year rolls around every July, for many businesses it still seems to catch them by surprise, as if the announcement had only come a few days earlier. We often see business owners rushing to squeeze in website upgrades into a tight timeframe, which frequently leads to hurried decisions, unnecessary stress, and missed opportunities.
We often compare building a website to constructing a house. Both require planning, budgeting, and careful decision-making. From concepts and floorplans to colours and materials, there are many steps involved before finally enjoying the fruits of your labour (and if you’re wondering why we’re not in construction, there’s your answer).
But here’s the key difference: unlike a physical house, your website doesn’t need to be fully completed at once. It can, and should, be dynamic, flexible, and designed to evolve over time. As long as your foundation is strong, you can comfortably add new “rooms,” features, or upgrades whenever the timing is right. As we have mentioned in previous blogs, your website is a living entity that thrives with ongoing care, regular maintenance and thoughtful planning.
With that in mind and regardless of what stage you are on your website development journey, we encourage businesses to prepare a structured and achievable roadmap that spreads your website improvements across the year. This strategy allows you to tackle specific areas at a time (and do it well), align upgrades with your business calendar (seasonal promotions, new service launches, SEO) and avoid taking rushed decisions or depleting your budget in just a few weeks.
Build your foundation (July to August)
If you are looking to make an impact and meaningful improvements this coming financial year, the best place to start is by taking a deep dive into the foundation. And while in some cases working with what you have is the right place to start, a lot of times, hearing the bad news quickly is not a bad thing. You wouldn’t start renovating your kitchen if the plumbing is not right or if connecting your appliances need an extension cord to the living room.
Running a health check and ensuring you have a solid framework in place is key if you want to plan for the long term. Some of the things to check in this phase include:
- Run a website health check. Are your plugins, themes and CMS up to date? Are you using outdated tools or scripts that could be replaced or removed? Is the backend built for growth?
- Review your hosting. Slow load times or downtime can signal that your hosting is not the right fit anymore. Switching to a reliable (cloud-based) hosting sets the tone for the rest of the year and makes growth easier.
- Fix what’s broken or start again? In some scenarios, this is an easy decision, nothing works and it is time to start again. However in some cases it requires extra consideration and a deeper look that goes beyond the technical aspects and includes site structure, accessibility, mobile responsiveness, loading speed, content, photography, video and everything in between. Having an external set of eye looking at your site is probably wise.
- Security and backups. Set up or review your backup strategy and security protocols. Many of these can be handled at the server level, so you are not relying on a dozen of plugins to patch holes reactively.
By sorting these essentials early in the year, you free yourself up to focus on growth, strategy and creativity in the months ahead. You won’t have to worry that the whole thing might fall apart because of an unreliable plugin or an unsecure backend.
SEO and Content Strategy (September – November)
Once you have a solid foundation, it’s time to consider how people actually find and engage with your site. As we have covered before, SEO is not just writing some keywords on a page, it is a long game.
Naturally, with new website builds we take SEO into consideration from the start by planning content and tackling all the technical SEO components as part of the site foundation. But again, depending on where you are within your journey here are some of the tasks you can consider during this time of the year:
- Audit what’s already there. Review your key pages starting from the homepage and moving to your services and contact pages. Are those targeting the right keywords? Is the message strong and specific? Are those aligned to what people are searching for? Perhaps the best way to do this is by using free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics or more specialised apps like SEMRush (if this is all foreign to you, reach out to us).
- Set up the basics. If that hasn’t been covered, make sure your site has all the SEO fundamentals in place: meta tags, image alt text, a logic URL structure, sitemap submitted to Google, structured data, performance KPIs, etc.
- Create a content plan. Think about upcoming events, low quality pages, key services, seasonal opportunities or industry trends.
This phase doesn’t need to be rushed. Focus on clarity, relevance and consistency. The goal is simple: make it easier for people to find you and ensure they want to stick on your website and reach out when they do.
Peak season (October – December)
For a lot of businesses, the end of the year is a critical time for different reasons: more sales, holiday bookings, community events, or simply wrapping up projects before a break.
While a lot of businesses start planning for this season at the end of November or early December, we encourage you to start looking at this earlier in the year. Setting up campaigns, creative, landing pages and preparing your site for more visits takes time and requires careful consideration to ensure smooth campaigns and better results. Here is what to focus on:
- Build targeted landing pages. This varies for each industry. For ecommerce website planning special offers, gift packages or promotional coupons is a must, while for other businesses creating custom landing pages with conversion tracking in place is important.
- Updating visuals. That includes homepage banners, seasonal promotions, hero sections and other relevant messaging. If you want to update your photography or incorporate video, start planning shoots earlier in the year. Not in December when humidity in Cairns becomes an issue or everyone gets busy in Melbourne.
- Checking performance. Again, more traffic requires better hosting specs. If you are expecting a spike in visitors, it is worth reviewing your hosting again and making sure it will handle the load.
Features and functionality upgrades (January to March)
The new year usually brings a bit of breathing space and new ideas. We find that this is the perfect time to work on bigger upgrades that need a bit more thought and testing and again, before the EOFY arrives!
This is a good time to start building features beyond the basics and add new features that support your long-term goals. Some things to consider are:
- New capabilities. It could be online bookings, memberships, gated content or a full e-commerce platform. This is the time to do it. A lot of businesses are not under pressure which will allow you to plan, test and launch without breaking something during the busy period.
- Better integrations. Connect your website to other tools you use to make your life easier. From CRMs and email marketing to payment gateways and operating systems. If your website and business applications are not talking to each other, you are probably doing things twice.
- User Experience upgrades. This is a good time to experiment and tweak your website. Simplifying your navigation, adding breadcrumbs or improve accessibility. These visual changers are often pushed down in the priority list and can make a huge difference in how people interact with your site.
- Performance optimisation. Aligned to the previous one, by digging a bit deeper into some techniques like lazy loading, image optimisation or removing unnecessary scripts you could be impacting user experience without having to empty your pockets with a whole new website.
Regular maintenance (Ongoing)
This is probably the less exciting part of running a website (for businesses, not for us, we like it). In most cases, you won’t see a big difference but it is probably one of the most important. A website that looks good but it has outdated plugins or broken features isn’t doing you and your visitors any favours.
Treat it like a car: if you skip the regular services, something will break at some point and it is likely it will cost more to fix it.
We have extensively talked about this before and we offer this service to anyone, however here are some things to include in your checklist:
- Plugin, theme and core updates. Set a schedule to check and run updates. At least on a monthly basis.
- Ensure automated backups are happening regularly. And probably more importantly, test your restore process ocassionaly.
- Security monitoring. Check your logs, particularly your login attempts and keep an eye on suspicious activity.
- Broken links and form checks. Rung regular audits to catch broken links or outdated pages. Test your own forms to make sure everything is running as planned (and yes, this is a common issue)
- Update content. Outdated blog posts, old team members, or past events that are still live. Keep your content relevant and up to date.
Refresh and optimise visual content (April to June)
As the financial year is coming to an end (and Cairns weather improves) it is the perfect time to take a look at your website’s visuals. If you haven’t updated your photos or videos for a while, chances are things are starting to feel a bit stale or no longer reflect who you are as a business. This is a good opportunity to:
- Photography updates. Team photos, office space, new services and products and replacing all generic stock photography from your site once and for all.
- Video content. From a reel that showcases your work and brand story to client testimonials or product explainers. Video build trust and keep users engaged.
- Design touch ups. Minor (or major) visual updates. Hero banners, better use of whitespace, updated icons and typography. You don’t have to redesign your website to make it look like new.
You don’t need to overhaul your entire website in just a few weeks. With a clear plan and pace, you can constantly improve your website throughout the year, without all the stress. And if you need help mapping out your website goals for the year, get in touch and well help you build a roadmap regardless of what step of the journey you are in.
