What is a Website Health Check? .
Website Health Audit
It’s important to check in on your website from time to time, make sure no critical security updates are outstanding and the general look and feel of the website are still as good as the day it went live. A website health check is also a good idea if you manage your website in house, in our experience we come across websites that have been edited with the best intentions at heart, however in some cases, images are not optimised for web use, the text doesn’t align and broken pages and links can appear. A health check will provide a detailed overview of how your website is performing. From this, you can make an action plan to make sure your site is fully optimised.
What does your Website Health Check need to include?
A website health check can be catered to your business. It can include a variety of different things including:
1. Security updates
These help keep applications and operating systems protected from viruses.
2. Fixing broken links
Fixing broken links will drive more conversion. Broken links are simply links that do not work. These occur when a webpage is no longer accessible. The URL or slug of a website has been changed or a webpage has been moved without being redirected.
3. Optimising images
Optimising images for web use will help your websites page loading speeds as well as make the images look more visually appealing. You will need to name your images descriptively and in plain text in order to do this.
In addition, doing this will also help with your SEO. It’s important to have keyword phrases to make your website rank in search engines. If you have a description with keywords in your images will be optimised. Similarly, optimising your alt attributes will help web accessibility. The alt attributes are the text alternative when a webpage can’t load the images. Alt attributes are also a value on your SEO score.
When optimising images you also need to make sure that your image dimensions are correct for the page and the image file size is correct. 50% of consumers won’t even wait 3 seconds for an eCommerce site load so you need to make sure that your page speeds are as fast as possible.
4. Analytics review
An analytics review will provide you with information about who comes to your website and when. It will also show you the number of visitors, and page views. You will then be able to see insights on the traffic that comes to your website, trends of pages and popularity which provides you with useful marketplace information that you can tailor your business goals to.
5. Optimising page names
One of the key elements of the foundation of your website is its page names. The page name has several important purposes. The page names help identify and locate a page for changes. In addition to this, they are also very important for SEO. The page name is displayed in the breadcrumbs. This with the category name, URL, and headings all add up to strengthen the page’s keyword ranking. The page name also appears in the websites global header navigation. When the page name contains a keyword phrase the page will be optimised for SEO.
6. Adding page subtitles
There are multiple reasons why adding page subtitles is good for your websites health and search engine ranking. HTML has six levels of headings. These are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. H1 is the highest and most important level, whereas H6 is the lowest importance. These headings have a hierarchy structure and break up the webpage into sections. Search engines use page subtitles in evaluating and ranking your webpage. It is important to put the content in the correct structure in order to rank.
7. Internal and external links
Adding any internal and external links could be beneficial to your SEO this is because search engines read URLs as priority information.
8. Button and link checker
Similarly to broken links, fixing broken buttons will drive more conversion. Broken links are simply links that do not work. Broken buttons are buttons that do not work. These usually occur when a webpage is no longer accessible. The URL or slug of a website has been changed or a webpage has been moved without being redirected
If you would like us to conduct a website health check on your website or have a question about another of our services please get in touch today.