Spring Cleaning: 11 Ways To Clean Up Your Web Presence

Next week, we’ll officially say goodbye to winter with the arrival of the Spring Equinox. To get you in the spirit, we’ve put together a digital spring cleaning list. From your website to your confirmation emails, we promise you’ll get you that deep-clean feeling by the end. Let’s get started:

Website

1. Add SSL certification to your site. If your site doesn’t already have the green HTTPS lock, it’s time to make the switch. Not only are consumers learning to look for the lock, but Google Chrome has started marking non-SSL sites (HTTP only) that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure.

2. Check your Call-to-Actions. Make sure your ‘Book Now’ button is visible from the homepage of your website. You should always have at least one CTA above-the-fold (visible without scrolling), typically in the header or center of the page.

Make sure it’s a button, not just a line of text, and that it is designed with some visual contrast.

Booking Form

3. Evaluate your mandatory custom fields. When it comes to the checkout, the rule of thumb is keep it simple. Revisit your booking form and see if there are any required forms that you can cut out. Remember, the true purpose of the checkout is to convert, not to collect information for marketing.

4. Reduce your booking cutoff times. The beautiful thing about real-time availability is that you can capture those seriously last-minute bookings (that happen all the time).

If you offer any tours or rentals that have the flexibility to accept walk-ups, make sure your calendar allows those bookings to come through. This allows the customer to both check and book last-minute availability, where seeing a ‘Call to Book’ option might sway them the other way.

5. Consolidate dynamic pricing. If you’re currently offering dynamic pricing options for weekdays, weekends or groups, consider establishing a uniform price for your activities. Dynamic pricing can affect abandon rates, as it prompts the customer to re-evaluate their decision in an effort to get a better price.

Emails

6. Clean up your email subscriber lists. You’ve been collecting emails from customers past (and future!), but when’s the last time you actually looked those over? In just a few minutes, you can audit the subscriber list in your preferred email marketing platform for inactive email addresses or typos.

If you are a FareHarbor client and don’t use an email marketing service, you can check your email marketing list by pulling a Contacts report from your Dashboard.

7. Review your confirmation, reminder and follow-up emails. Haven’t checked these in a while? Now is a good time to review them for any outdated information, broken links or opportunities to improve.
Update confirmation emails in FareHarbor >

Social Media

8. Update your descriptions and header images. This is all about fresh content. If you haven’t updated your pages lately, take a minute to swap in your latest photography or highlight that new 2017 offering.

FareHarbor Backend

9. Try a new Bookings view. Even if you’ve already customized your Bookings calendar, you may want to try out the new Grid view, which lets you organize and group information exactly how you want it, and even choose the number of days you see at a time.

10. Add new seasonal employees. Gear up for your spring season by adding new users and removing old ones.

11. Perfect your Manifest. Remove unused columns, add a summary row, or clean up your custom manifests to ensure you’re getting exactly what you need. Read all about these options and more on our help page.