4 Regular Website Checks You Should Carry Out for the Best User Performance

Your website is one of your businesses’ most valuable tools, so it’s important that it’s a reflection of the great products and services that you offer. While you may have splashed out on a professionally designed website when you first launched your business, your website is something that should be growing and evolving over time, so to ensure that it doesn’t get stuck in the past.

Here are some things you should regularly check about your website to ensure it’s giving the best impression to users.

1. Navigation

Pretend you’re a website user who has just found your website, whether it’s through Google or a Facebook advert. Is it easy to find the products they’d be looking for? Will they be able to check out quickly and easily? You should know the most common search queries that lead to your website, so consider how easy it is to find the relevant page.

2. Content

Keeping your content fresh and up to date is worthwhile for many reasons. It shows that the webpage is live and current, and not just some abandoned project. Google ranks pages higher if they have newer, relevant content, so ensure your blog gets updated weekly and consider a refresh of things like your headers, banners and product content on a regular basis, such as when seasons change.

It sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how many businesses don’t keep simple things like contact details up to date. 80% of customers lose trust in a business with incorrect contact details, and around half of consumers say they’d find incorrect opening hours or poor-quality photos off-putting.

3. Social media

While not part of your main website, many businesses link to their social media pages or have a widget showing recent tweets or reviews. There are many reasons why you should market your brand on Twitter and the other major social media sites, but you should also ensure you know what people are saying back to you. Nothing is worse than visiting a company’s website and seeing an angry one-star review on display, so make sure you’re politely responding to negative tweets and reviews and building a good reputation on social media.

4. Website security

When people register, send an enquiry, or buy something through your website, they expect you to look after their data. You should regularly have a website security audit to check for:

• Weaknesses in your code
• Vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers
• Viruses, trojans and other malware

While your website may have been perfectly secure when it was built, cybersecurity is a fast-moving industry, and new threats are detected all the time. What may have been secure a couple of months ago may be easy to exploit now. Luckily, there are several websites that offer security audits which you can run online.

Your website doesn’t need to be rebuilt every few months, but it’s important to keep it fresh and up to date. A quick check of some basic things will ensure that you get the best possible search engine performance, offer a great user journey, and aren’t vulnerable to hacking.