Is my website performing? Is it reaching its full potential for my business?

These are some questions that some companies don’t ask themselves. Other companies ask themselves these questions, but then don’t know how to find the answers.

Let me tell you that some of your competitors will ask themselves this and find the answers and will grow at a greater rate than you and will take away some of your potential business.

Most companies have Google Analytics on their site which gives an overview of how your site is performing, converting and which areas are achieving the most traffic. It’s a great tool and there is lots of great data to use for which direction to go in for further marketing. But is this enough?

No.

There are many other areas which can be analysed and quantified to show if your website is performing including: SEO, security, website speed, broken links, accessibility, and best practices.

SEO performance

There are 2 main areas of Search Engine Optimisation, technical and content.

Setting up the technical aspects of your website is the base of your search engine performance.

• Is it crawlable and indexed?
• Are all the URLs formed correctly?
• Is the viewport setup correctly?
• Is it encoded correctly?
• Does it return the correct status code?
• Is there a favicon?

Optimising your on-page content will increase your search engine rankings.

• Are the page titles, meta descriptions, h1 and on page content all setup for the search terms that you would like each page to rank for?
• Are there enough words on each page?
• Are all the alt tags on the pages present and optimised?
• Do all the links have a descriptive text?

There are many other areas in this section too and if they aren’t correct, it could be that your pages are never indexed by search engines.

Security

Security is vital to your data and your customers data. Without a secure site you won’t rank as well in search engines as they won’t trust it and worse still your site could be vulnerable to hackers.

• Is the site delivered over HTTPS secured by an SSL certificate?
• Does it have a strong Content Security Policy?
• Is the site GDPR compliant?
• Is Strict-Transport-Security configured correctly?
• Do you use plugins that are outdated and have security flaws?

Without these areas correctly setup, your site will be vulnerable.

Let me tell you that some of your competitors will ask themselves this and find the answers and will grow at a greater rate than you and will take away some of your potential business.

Website speed

Delivering the content of your website fast will stop users leaving. Google research suggests users not clicking on a subsequent page (bounce rate) will go up 90% if the site load time increases by 5 seconds. *

• Are your images encoded, formatted, sized correctly, compressed, and cached?
• Is your CSS & JavaScript combined, minified, compressed and cached?
• Is the HTML compressed?
• Is there an efficient cache policy?
• Do your pages have too many elements?

You could be losing customers if your site isn’t delivered quickly. Most traffic is now delivered to a mobile device and mobile device speeds are slower and must be considered too.

Broken Links

Over time pages change location or are deleted that other page’s link to. This produces broken links. Finding these and changing or deleting them will stop the dreaded Page Not Found error (404) for your users.

Accessibility

Is your website setup so people with disabilities can use them.

• Do all buttons have an accessible name?
• Do all images have alt attributes?
• Do all form elements have labels?
• Are all ID attributes unique?
• Do your foreground and background colours have a sufficient contrast ratio?
• Are your aria and roles attributes setup correctly?
• Is the website responsive?

People with differing abilities are still customers and making a site accessible to all will increase conversion in these groups.

Best Practices

There are other attributes that your site must have that don’t fit into other areas.

• Having a correct doctype
• Not allowing users to paste into password fields
• Having no errors or issues in the console log
• Defining the correct charset

These are still industry best practices and must be set so your website is setup correctly.

*https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/