The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

172. The Year-End Website Audit That Gets You More Sales

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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Let me guess - you built your website, checked it off your list, and now it’s collecting dust. Or maybe you’re eyeing a trendy 2026 redesign! In this episode, I share why year-end is the ideal time to stop chasing trends and start treating your site like the strategic business tool it should be. You’ll learn the biggest mistakes business owners make, the data that really matters, and a simple website audit you can complete before December 31 to choose the most impactful updates for early 2026…so that your site finally works for your business.

01:47 – Why treating your website as “done” is a costly mistake

02:38 – The dangers of chasing website trends (and what to do instead)

04:35 – How to use real data instead of gut feelings for updates

05:46 – What heat maps reveal about your visitors’ behavior

07:22 - Implementing a year-end website audit based on your data

09:26 – Scheduling strategic website updates for next year

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode172 

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Kristen Doyle:

Let me guess, you built your website, maybe you even paid good money for someone else to build it, and now it just sits there like a digital business card you haven't changed in years. Or maybe worse, you're about to spend hours and hours or a lot of money redesigning it, because you saw some cool new trend everyone's talking about for 2026. Here's the truth, the end of the year is the perfect time to do an audit of your website, because two of the major mistakes I see business owners making are assuming that once your site is done, it's done and it doesn't need to be updated, and second, treating it like a fun little project where you can jump on trends instead of the business tool it needs to be. So today I am going to share with you a mindset shift around your website as a strategic tool, and a year end website audit that's going to help you stop chasing trends and start focusing on what actually matters—getting your website to work for you and getting your visitors to turn into customers. And I'm going to give you a specific action plan that you can implement between now and the end of the year. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like teachers Pay Teachers, Etsy, or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no fluff tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process—things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automations and so much more. Let's get started, y'all. So many business owners make the mistake of assuming that once their site is done, it's done, and they don't need to update it ever. But this creates a lot of real problems for your business. You might have outdated information that confuses visitors, maybe offers that you don't sell anymore, or old contact information that's no longer good. Maybe you've got broken links that frustrate your potential customers, and missed opportunities to show off the new things that you're offering right now. See, your business is probably evolving constantly. It's what we do as small business owners. But for a lot of people, their website kind of stays frozen in time. And that happens because websites can kind of feel finished once you launch them, unlike maybe your social media, which more obviously needs regular updating. The second big mistake I see people make is treating your website like a vanity project instead of a business tool. A lot of times, I see people focusing on what they think looks cool instead of what your customers need, or getting distracted by trendy features that don't improve conversion rates, maybe redesigning the site based on your personal preferences instead of what the data is telling you. At the end of the year, especially, you'll see people sharing their website outlook trends for 2026, what's coming in website development. But remember, those trends aren't what get you customers. It might be fun. You might like it from just a vanity standpoint, looking at your site and thinking about how pretty it is and how on trend and new it is, but that's not usually what gets customers for you. It's really easy to chase those trends, because we all get excited about new features and new designs, and we start thinking about what we like, we see those posts about what's hot for 2026. But when you chase trends, you're going to have to just continue chasing those trends year after year after year and creating this constant cycle of redesigning your site in ways that don't actually improve results. They're just busy work and maybe even expensive busy work for your website. So instead of chasing those trends, I'm going to encourage you to make a mindset shift and start by focusing on your business goals and what you want your site to do for you. Every decision you make about an update to your site should be viewed through the lens of a customer. How is this going to look and feel and work better for the customer than what I'm currently doing? Can you incorporate some trendy things when you do that? Absolutely, but focus more on the performance than the esthetics. Every update you make should improve your website's performance, not just the way that it looks. The key to making those strategic updates is about using real data from real customers, not just hunches that you might have. So ask yourself questions like, Are you getting traffic to the most important pages on your site? Once you get that traffic, are those people taking the action you want them to take? Are they engaging with your content? Are they staying on the page long enough to read it? And are they clicking the link over to whatever you want them to be their next step? There are a lot of tools you can use to gather that data. I'm going to recommend a few for you that I use and trust. The first one is Google Analytics. I know, simple as that is, Google Analytics is really important for helping you understand traffic patterns and user behavior on your site. It's also the best way to just know how many people are viewing your pages in general. You can also use Google Search Console, that helps you see how you are showing up in search results, how high up in the results pages, what search terms are you showing up for, and how are you getting people to convert into clicks from the search results as well. Both of those are completely free, but if you want to go a little bit further, there are some paid tools that you can use that create heat maps on your website. One is called Mouseflow. That's the one I am currently using, and I've also used Hotjar in the past. Both of those will show exactly how users are interacting with your pages, and this is really important for learning what updates you need to make on your site versus what needs to get left alone, because it's already working well. See, what I see a lot of times is people get excited about new trends, and they start making changes, and they actually take away features that were doing really well on their site because they didn't look at the data first. So let's talk about what a heat map like Mouseflow or Hotjar can show you. They record visitor sessions on your website, anonymously of course, they anonymize the user data, but you're able to see on the recording where people are ignoring your call to action buttons, or where they're clicking on things that aren't actually clickable, where they might be getting stuck at dead ends. You can also see where they are scrolling straight past certain parts of your pages and ignoring them completely. And when you have that kind of information, then you can optimize your layout based on actual user behavior. So for example, if your heat map shows that people are only making it 20% of the way down the page before they exit, then you know that your main offers might need to move up higher on the page, or you need to do a better job of reeling people in so they'll stick around your page longer. Alright, so let's talk about how to actually implement a year end website audit based on that data. The first step, of course, is gather the data. So pull up Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If you haven't used a heat mapping tool already, install one of those. Wait a couple of weeks to collect some data and then come back and look at that. You want to look for patterns in the data. So those pages that have really high bounce rates, meaning people exit your website from those pages, what your heat map is showing you about where people are clicking versus the things that they are ignoring, and review where your leads and your purchases are actually coming from. So look for the source of that traffic as well. Look through your data first, but then take a step back and audit your website like a first time visitor. Click through your entire site as if you're seeing it for the first time, and be really honest with yourself about what you find. For the moment, try to forget everything you know about your business as the business owner, and think like a first time visitor. Look specifically for anything that might be confusing to them, anywhere you're not super clear about who you are and what you offer and how you help and how they can get it. Look for outdated information, things like old services or business models that you might have changed, look for broken links or any kind of navigation issues, those super important pages that maybe are kind of hidden on your site, and there's no way for people to get to them. And look for what I call dead end pages. These are ones where there is no clear call to action, and outside of maybe going up to the menu or searching, there's nothing I know for sure I need to do from this page. Pay extra special attention to the most important pages. So this would probably be your homepage, and then either a services or a product page, sales pages, your shop storefront. Those most important pages, give those the most attention. And then your third step is to plan some time to make strategic updates. If you have big problems that are super easy and quick to fix, like a broken link, fix those right away. Don't let that stuff just linger around on your site if you can fix it in just a few minutes. But then identify maybe three main improvement opportunities that are going to take a little more time, and schedule those out in your calendar once a month for the first quarter of 2026. Think about upcoming business changes, things you're planning to do, maybe a new direction you're going to head with your business in the first quarter, and make sure you're getting your site ready to make those changes with you. And then mark your calendar. Make a reminder to check your data again in three months. I like to check my data at least once every quarter, and use that to tweak my site, just little bits at a time to make sure it's performing as well as it can. Alright, so here's what you need to do. Your main action step for convert visitors into customers. When you stop chasing what's today is to block out a couple of hours to schedule an end of the year audit of your entire website sometime before December 31. Pull up your analytics, go through every page like a new visitor to your site, and then look for those quick wins. If you've got any outdated information, old service names, discontinued products, broken links, those kinds of things, fix those immediately, because those small fixes can make a big difference in customer trust. When they, you know, find out that, oh well, you don't actually offer this anymore, or they click a link for something they were excited about and it doesn't work. Make those quick fixes immediately, and then plan out some time in January, February and March to make some bigger updates. When you break it into those monthly tasks, it makes it a lot more manageable to make those updates while you're still running the rest of your business. trendy and start focusing on what your data tells you actually works, that's when your website becomes a really strong asset for your business. Like I said, your action step this week is pretty simple, schedule that website audit. Take some time and do that before the end of the year. The business owners that are going to do well in 2026 are not the ones with the trendiest websites. They're the ones with the websites that actually work. If you found this episode helpful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our next episode. And if you have a minute, I would really appreciate you taking a second to leave a review or a rating on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other business owners like you find the show so that I can help them with these same kinds of strategies. I'll talk to you soon.