Does your website pass its health checks?
As businesses are starting to return back to work due to Covid-19 restrictions being slowly lifted, its essential that you are making sure your website is in its finest condition. Here are 10 essential health checks that you can perform yourself to make sure your website is ready for more users:
1. Check your company name in Google
It’s likely that you rarely search for your own business in Google. However, if a customer, or even a potential customer, wants to get your contact details or look something up on your website, they will type in your company name rather than entering your website address. This means they will see your Google listing before going to your website. It’s therefore really important to take the time to have a look and check that you’re happy with what comes up. If your business doesn’t come up first in Google or your Google MyBusiness listing doesn’t show up, then you have some work to do here.
2. Check your Google Reviews
When you perform check 1 above, your Google Info panel should show how up on the right-hand side of the search results. A really important aspect of the information within your info panel is your Google review star rating. If you don’t have a health score you could be missing out on new customers. Important steps to a healthy Google review star rating include a) asking for Google reviews b) replying to each review c) learning from reviews, so if you are getting negative reviews, taking actions to improve your product/service.
3. Check if your website passes the 5-second rule
Ask a few people who don’t know your business very well to look at your homepage for 5 seconds. Now close the website and ask them what you do and what makes you unique. If they can’t, you need to look at simplifying your messaging.
4. Check every page on your website to make sure it’s still relevant
Our businesses evolve over time. People come and go, our products/service/prices change and we win/lose customers. Take the time to have a read through every page of your website to make sure all the information on it is still relevant, up to date and promoting your business.
5. Check that it’s clear you’re open for business
With all the changes in our businesses and lives that we’ve had to make since Covid-19, we need to communicate what’s happening in our businesses and if we’re open. Use your home page, contact page or a dedicated ‘Covid-19’ page to let your website visitors know what you’re doing in response to the pandemic, what’s changed in your business and how you are continuing to help customers.
6. Check your opening hours are correct
Following on from point 5, you may have changed your opening hours. Take a look at your Google MyBusiness listing to make sure your opening hours are correct so customers know what time they can visit you.
7. Check your Social Media profiles link to your website
With social media being such an important source of traffic for our website, it’s important that ALL our social media accounts link to our website. In most cases, you’ll want to make sure they link to the home page of your website.
8. Check for broken links
A broken link is where you click on a link in your website menu or content and it goes to a URL (website page address) that doesn’t exist – usually because the page address has changed. This is harmful to both user experience and search engine ranking. Use a broken link checker such as Dead Link Checker to make sure you don’t have any on your website.
9. Check your enquiry form is working
Most of us have enquiry forms on our website that we rely on for new business enquiries. Try and get in the habit of checking your website enquiry form each month so you’re confident it’s always working. The most common issue with enquiry forms is email getting sent to your junk/spam folder and you missing the enquiry.
10. Check your website’s SSL certificate
An SSL certificate gives your website the green or closed padlock symbol in the address bar. This shows website visitors that your website is secure and any data they submit through it, is encrypted. As things change on your website or your SSL expires (they need renewing every year usually) your SLL can stop working and your website can show as ‘Not Secure’. This will put visitors off contacting you so it’s import to check.
Thank you for reading, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Rob.