Review my site

Knowing what people are doing and looking at when coming to your site helps to get insights into what your users want or need. Can they find material easily? Are they confused by labels? Is search returning the right results? What are users searching for? Using analytics and reporting tools to understand what's happening on your site can help you focus on improving experiencing, understanding the flow of traffic and help you prioritise improvements to your site and content. 

For GovCMS SaaS customers, Google Analytics is used to collect traffic information and is available for you to include your existing or new Google Analytics codes. This allow you to self manage those analytics for reporting for your site. 

Is there any legal or reporting requirements your website has? Ensuring you fill your obligations around these is an important aspect of managing a site. Many government agencies are required to publish Freedom of Information requests and should include this on relevant sites. Government agencies should also align their sites to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0+ to ensure their site works for their audience. 

While not all of it is a requirement, there are best practice and improved usability opportunities you can implement when working in your site. There's the Digital Service Standard, a set of best-practice principles for designing and delivering government services. It helps digital teams to build services that are simple, clear and fast.

Sometimes the meaning of a site can get lost over time. Maybe the intent of the site has changed over time. It's important to consider the purpose of your site and whether it's serving the right audience, whether the information fits the audience, whether it aligns to organisation branding and directions in your corporate plan and the overall direction you want to have. 

Considering these when reviewing your site helps you bring focus to the purpose and direction of the site. Having clear goals and boundaries for the site helps in maintaining the site, its currency and longevity. 

Broken links, missing content and files can frustrate those using a site with a bad experience. Reviewing broken links or missing information on a site can be thankless task, but ensuring the site works and has material available means an improved experience. 

There are a myriad of tools available online and as standalone products that can assist in link checking across public facing sites.

If content has moved, consider implementing relevant redirects or removing no longer current links from your material.

Reviewing content in your site is an opportunity to consider the amount of content, the currency of the content and engage with business areas about the need for the content. Content that is out of date, no longer needed or incorrect should be reviewed and considered for removal. Highlight to business areas the status of the page, how long since it has been updated and seek changes to correct/update information. Couple content with information from your site traffic to highlight value or lack of engagement with the material to help support your case for action.

Before removing anything, it's a good bet to start with backing up your site in case content needs to be retrieved or restored later. It's also good practice to action regularly. 

In a standard GovCMS setup, you can access content once logged into your site from the Content heading in the administration menu. From there, you can review, filter, edit, add and delete content in your site. 

Similar to reviewing content in your site, reviewing media such as images (PNG, JPG, GIF), documents (PDF, Office documents), rich media (Video, audio, interactive integrations) and supporting scripts and stylesheets once again can help you determine currency, volume and need. 

Media that is no longer in use, needed or is incorrect should be reviewed and determined whether it should be kept or removed from your site. Couple media with information from your site traffic to highlight value or lack of engagement with the material to help support your case for action.

Before removing anything, it's a good bet to start with backing up your site in case media needs to be retrieved or restored later. It's also good practice to action regularly. 

In a standard GovCMS setup, you can access content once logged into your site from the Content > Media heading in the administration menu. From there, you can review, filter, edit, and add media in your site. 

It's important to ensure access and security is in mind with any site. You should review user access regularly for your site and remove access and users that no longer require access.

For GovCMS customers, see our Keep accounts up to date page for more information.