Defect vs. Bug: 4 Tips On How to Prioritize Website Fixes

Websites are dynamic. They are ever-evolving and changing. As a business, you need to ensure your website meets certain standards in terms of accessibility, usability, relevance, and optimization. Not to mention ensuring it’s in alignment with your strategic business and marketing goals and objectives. Consequently, there is ALWAYS something to work on.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 92% have more confidence in information found online than they do in anything from a sales clerk or other source. In this week’s digital marketing blog, we’ll discuss how to prioritize your website fixes. We’ll outline the types of things to consider, how to identify issues, and how to determine what to tackle first.

What Should You Be Looking at When Assessing Your Website?

Websites can have a variety of things that could require attention. They could have a bug, defect, usability issue or require regular content and graphical updates to keep things current. Here are some of the things you need to monitor regularly:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content
Site Speed
User Experience
Mobile Responsiveness
Performance Metrics
Security

1. How to Identify Website Issues

Regularly auditing your website is essential to stay on top of website issues and updates. It’s one of the first things we do with our clients and something every competent digital marketing agency should be doing. You have access to a variety of tools to identify website issues. Here are some of the tools you can use to identify website issues:

Google Search Console
Google Analytics
SEMRush / Ahrefs
UX and technical reports
User input
Staying up-to-date with Google updates

These tools will provide you with a good overall snapshot of what work needs to be completed on your website. It’s likely your website requires attention in multiple areas. So, you need to determine what you should address first and what can wait. You can do this by looking at the costs and benefits of each update to be completed.

2. Perform a Cost-Benefit Analysis

Your approach to website updates will be unique based on the current state of your website. It’s important to think about things in terms of the biggest benefit and cost of each action.

Which changes will create the biggest fixes?
Is there any low-hanging fruit that is quick to repair?
Which things have to get done immediately?
What are the “nice to haves”?

Some tasks only take a few minutes, while others could take months to complete. Think about the time, effort and the cost of each update. Then you need to think about the benefit, or result, of the update.

Website updates can have a range of effects. For example, some minor tweaks could have very little impact, while other changes could make a significant impact (search engine rankings, how people use your website, your ability to close more sales).

It’s important to be aware that the amount of effort you put into an update does not equate to having the biggest changes in some cases. For example, updating all the images on your website can be time consuming, but it could have very little impact. On the other hand, making a few strategic updates to a web page copy could create a spike in website traffic and sales.

3. Create a Priority List

Thinking about the cost and benefit of your website updates, it’s important to create a priority list.

How do proposed changes fit within your marketing plan or business strategy? What is the objective for the change? To increase traffic, conversions, make your website easier to manage, improve user experience? Which updates make the most sense considering your current circumstances?

Keep in mind that you can work on multiple changes at the same time. You can make progress on larger or time-consuming changes as you knock off quick updates.

4. Always Test the Results

Start working through your list of updates. Check back to see the impact of the change. What does it tell you? Did it work? Should you move forward with more related changes? Much like what we do with our work as a digital marketing agency, always test to see if your efforts are worthwhile. Website updates are ongoing. Make sure to regularly audit your website, identify required changes, and prioritize your list.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing agency that cuts through the digital media marketing hype to deliver real results. Our unbiased, data-driven audits help you understand what’s working, and what’s not. Read some marketing case studies or give us a call to pop the hood on your marketing.