5 Areas to Review for a Comprehensive Website Health Check

Why You Should Check Website Health Regularly

While a good design is visually appealing, it’s crucial not to overlook the underlying performance of your website. Even the most attractive user interfaces are ineffective without a well-functioning site. Just as regular checkups are essential for personal health, frequent tests and maintenance are necessary to ensure your site performs optimally and delivers the information users need. Regular checks should ensure that everything is up-to-date, functioning properly, and performing efficiently. In this article, we will explore five key areas to monitor for maintaining your website’s health.

1

Perform Mobile Site Optimizations

With advancements in the digital age, computers and desktops are no longer the main tools for web searching. Research shows that mobile traffic is responsible for approximately half of web traffic globally, generating nearly 59% of traffic worldwide as of late 2023. This means that a majority of your audience is using smaller screens to search the web and may not even own a larger desktop. Keeping this in mind, it’s essential for businesses to ensure their site has a high-functioning mobile layout.

Failing to optimize for mobile will lead to countless problems when trying to view your site on a smartphone. A beautiful desktop layout can become a cluttered mess on a smaller screen. When designing your site, create a separate layout for mobile, along with your desktop version. While this may seem like extra work, it is essential if you want your site to provide an optimal experience for website visitors.

2

Focus on Page Speed Improvements

In today’s fast-paced digital world, users expect instant access to information, making page load speed crucial to your site’s success. If your pages take more than three seconds to load, users are likely to abandon your site and easily find a faster alternative among the billions of websites online. To keep visitors engaged, ensure your site delivers quick and efficient performance.

Here are 3 ways you can improve the speed of your site:

1. Optimize images and video: This includes items like reducing the file size of all media assets and limiting the number of assets on each page.
2. Leverage a caching, page speed plugin: WP Rocket is a popular option.
3. Upgrade your web hosting package: Taking this step is especially important for more resource-intensive websites.

Improving page speed not only satisfies users but improves your overall SEO ranking. If your pages don’t load quickly enough, Google crawlers won’t see them or deem them unimportant, hurting your SEO score.

3

Locate and Fix Broken Links

Linking to resources both internally and externally can provide great benefits for your website. Outsourcing backlinks to reputable sources gives your site trust, credibility, and reliability, while internal links are helpful for navigation throughout your site. Internally, this helps users find pages easily, navigate between them, and improves your user interface, making your site more user-friendly.

While these links are beneficial, when broken, they negatively impact your site’s health. External links that redirect users to deactivated web pages can cause your site and the information you provide to appear outdated. Even worse, old domains can be purchased and repurposed for phishing sites, putting your customers at risk of cyber threats.

Regularly checking your links, internally and externally, is crucial for maintaining your website’s health. To easily locate and check for broken links on your website, you can use Ahrefs’ broken link checker.

4

Consider User Interface Design

When making websites, apps, or other programs, your user interface is critical as the forward-facing component your audience will interact with. A user interface refers to how the pages and buttons are laid out and how your customers will navigate your site. Good user interfaces follow the golden rule—“don’t make me think.” This means that your audience should be able to easily navigate your site and find information without using any brain power.

Complicated and confusing websites are frustrating and annoying to deal with. As previously mentioned, with the seemingly endless amount of websites on the internet, users have no problem finding one that performs well if yours does not. The easier your site is to click through, the more traffic you will receive. For additional ways to increase user engagement, check out the following resource linked here.

Beyond increasing user engagement, it is also important to ensure you have a tangible way of measuring your website’s performance. One way to do so is by checking Google Analytics. Google Analytics can show you key metrics such as engagement time and bounce rate. Additional metrics to consider tracking are located in our post on Understanding Website User Engagement with Google Analytics Metrics.

5

Understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Considerations

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving traffic to your website, which is achieved by seeing improvements in your site’s page rankings. By optimizing your website for search engines that prioritize content deemed most helpful to the user, you encourage them to serve up your content earlier in the results. Performed through a combination of technical and content improvements, increased SEO rankings are gained, in part, by addressing the items previously mentioned in this article—page speed, working links, mobile optimization, user interface improvements, and most importantly, keywords.

Keywords are another crucial part of this process. These should be popular words or phrases often searched when researching a service or item relevant to your business. Conduct keyword research or hire a firm specializing in this skill to identify top terms for your trade, and be sure to include these on your site. The titles, headers, body copy, and meta descriptions on your website should include these keywords.

The Digital Marketing Institute explains that “URLs that contain terms similar to a keyword have a 45% higher click-through rate compared to those without one.” However, it is important not to use too many because Google will flag this as “keyword stuffing,” or attempting to take advantage of the ranking system. This will penalize your site by lowering your score.

Keep a Pulse on Your Website’s Health to Improve the User Experience

Regular monitoring and improvements are essential to ensure your website performs at its best. Like your own health, regular checkups and tests are required to ensure your site is working properly and providing a great experience for its visitors. Mobile optimization, page speed, links, and the user interface are all aspects to pay close attention to for your site’s health and its SEO rankings for predetermined keywords. A poor user experience doesn’t just hurt your visitors; it impacts your business’s bottom line. Make website maintenance and SEO optimizations a priority by either partnering with a specialized agency or dedicating internal resources to keep your digital presence in peak condition.