Check your website’s health with these tips & tools

A website may have beautiful web pages, wonderfully written content, and stunning images, but there may be serious health problems lurking just beneath the shiny surface.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to check website health across vital aspects including load times, user experience, and mobile responsiveness. We also look at practical suggestions on how to maximise performance, minimise threats, and improve search engine rankings.

What Do We Mean By Website Health?

A website health check is the process of thoroughly evaluating the overall performance, security, and functionality of your website. The goal is to identify issues, weaknesses, or potential problems that may affect the website's performance. A health check allows you to identify shortfalls and implement fixes in order to better drive up those all-important visits, clicks and conversions!

This check is typically carried out by the website owner or developer, utilising various specialised tools and services. There are many free online tools that support a website health check, which may be a good starting point – we’ll share our favourites later in the article. However, for a thorough health check it’s always beneficial to work with professional web developers like the talented team at Ryde. 

Why Is Website Health Important?

If your website is not in good health, chances are your business is not as healthy as it could be. Your products may be appealing, but if customers struggle with long page load times and links that don’t lead where they should, they may abandon their cart at the checkout. Basically, your website’s health is directly linked to conversions and sales, meaning that a website in poor health is likely to have major knock-on effects for revenue.

How often should you perform a website health check?;

We're living in fast-moving times and every day your site performance speed is lagging behind your competitors you're losing customers.

It's therefore best to schedule a regular, formal website health check. For large busy sites, a monthly check is advisable. At the minimum, a thorough evaluation should be performed every quarter.

Aspects of Website Health To Check

Broken links

Broken links and error pages aren't a good look. They mean:

• Frustrated users
• Damaged credibility
• Stalled traffic

In addition, Google measures the quality of internal and external links when ranking web pages on the SERPs. Broken links can flatline your page ranking which makes it harder for people to find you organically. 

A health check allows you to locate and fix broken links and restore user confidence, boost traffic and improve search rankings. Forms, scripts, and other interactive elements should also be checked when you address broken links.

Page speed

Based on an analysis of the 100 top web pages worldwide, the average web page load time is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile. However, some of the stats around slow page speeds are eye-watering:

• 40% of users leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load
• 47% of people expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less
• A 1-second delay in page response can cause a 7% drop in conversions

The above statistics should be ample incentive to analyse your website's loading speed, server response times, and overall responsiveness.

Maybe your response speeds have slowed due to a substantial traffic increase. That’s good – but you may need to quickly add server resources, streamline the site, reduce Flash content, or implement browser/HTTP caching to accommodate for this increased traffic.

The bottom line is, when it comes to site speed you only have a second or two to lose so keeping tabs on page speed health is essential.

Mobile responsiveness

Hopefully, your website was designed to be mobile-friendly. Today, mobile responsiveness is industry standard and is absolutely essential to reach customers who shop on their smartphones or are likely to visit your website on the go. 

A positive mobile experience leads to:

• Increased engagement
• Higher conversion rates
• Improved SEO (search engines tend to prioritise mobile-friendly websites in their rankings)

It's important to regularly check mobile compatibility and make necessary adjustments to ensure that your site caters effectively to mobile users.

Test the site on a variety of mobile devices with different screen sizes and operating systems. Emulators, device labs, or real devices can be used for this purpose.

Some websites may have mobile-only features or content. During the compatibility check, make sure these features are working correctly and do not cause any conflicts with the desktop version.

UX design

In our noisy digital world, it's hard enough to bring customers to your site. It's depressing if you attract potential buyers only to lose them halfway through the sales journey because your processes aren't user friendly.

The goal of UX design is to create and deliver easy, efficient, relevant, and all-around pleasant experiences for the user. UX stands for 'user experience' and refers to the user's entire experience with a digital product or service. (Note: UI stands for 'user interface' and refers to the visual elements that users interact with.) A website hygiene check allows you to drill into how seamless the user experience really is. 

You should also review web analytics like Google Analytics. This will provide valuable insights into user behaviour, sticking points, popular content, and conversion rates.

Be sure to review your website's content during a health assessment to check that all information is current, accurate, fresh, and engaging. Product display boxes that were eye-catching two years ago could be outdated now.

Web accessibility

Proper web accessibility ensures that your website is inclusively accessible to people with disabilities who may use various assistive technologies, such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, voice recognition software, or alternative input devices.

A health check may inform decisions to serve more of the following in your digital store:

• Captions
• High contrast colours
• Easy-to-read fonts
• Alt-text with images
• Incorporating an accessibility widget

Security measures

It goes without saying that the security of your site is paramount. A regular comprehensive evaluation of your protections and protocols is vital to check for vulnerabilities like malware infections, data breaches, and hacking intrusions.

You also have an obligation to ensure that sensitive data, such as user information and payment details, is well protected. The health check should ensure these processes are still adequate. Ongoing vigilance and investigation of suspicious activity should be standard procedure.

Useful Tools And Services For Website Health Checks

Use any of these paid or free tools to help you check the health of your website.

Broken Links

• Ahrefs Broken Link Checker
• Check My Links (a Google extension)

Website Speed

• GTmetrix
• Google PageSpeed
• Pingdom

Mobile responsiveness

• Google's Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool that lets you check if your website meets its mobile-friendly criteria and offers remedies if not

UX Insights

• Tools like Crazy Egg and Hotjar use heatmaps to help you understand your customers better

Accessibility

• To improve accessibility, web developers and designers follow standards and guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provided by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Security

• If you are firewall-protected, check with your provider that the service is operating as expected with all current updates and protocols in place
• FreeCyberScan offers a full cyber health report

Conclusion

Regularly performing website health checks establishes a culture of continuous improvement and keeps your website performing well. By addressing issues promptly and proactively, you will ensure your website stays current, engaging, effective, and SEO-robust.

Ryde is a full-service website agency committed to website support as well as developing and designing winning websites. If you have specific website needs please don't hesitate to connect with us.

Photo by Ekaterina Bolovtsova