Your website is the ‘hub’ of all marketing channels, campaigns or activities.
If it goes down, or isn’t up to standards, it’ll sabotage the rest of your efforts – dragging down ROI in the process.
That’s even more challenging when you’re not technical, or don’t how to assess its quality in the first place.
But you can use these six questions as a place to start to assess website performance, design, and how well your site is up-to-date.
1. What is my hosting provider’s ‘uptime’?
‘Shared’ hosting isn’t inherently bad, but it can slow down your website because it’s sharing resources with others as well.
The problem is that many cheap ‘shared’ hosting plans also suffer from poor ‘uptime’, which is a metric that shows how often your site goes down or is offline.
If yours is anything less than 99.9%, you should get a better host.
2. How often do you back up and make updates?
Bad things inevitably happen to website. It’s par for the course unfortunately.
As a security measure, you should always backup your site at least weekly (if not daily) to somewhere external place to make sure you can always restore a working copy if something bad were to happen.
Site updates, especially on some platforms like WordPress are also critical to making sure there’s no security loopholes that hackers might expose.
3. Does my website have any missing ‘meta descriptions’?
‘Meta descriptions’ are those concise summaries that show up on search result pages under a headline. They’re critical to increasing the amount of people that click on your site when searching for whatever you sell.
The problem, is that even new websites almost always go live without these. And it creates a bad user experience that decreases the amount of people who might visit your site.
4. Does my site work across all devices?
‘Responsive’ design refers to making a website work seamlessly across all browsers and devices. If your site is ‘responsive’, it’s usually built to the latest code standards and doesn’t contain any outdated or legacy data.
(Hint: You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see for yourself.)
5. How fast is my site?
Website speed doesn’t just make for a better experience. It also impacts how much your site can sell, too.
This is especially true on mobile devices. For example, one study showed that a whopping 74% of people will leave your mobile site if it doesn’t load within only 5 seconds.
6. Are ‘Goals’ set-up in Google Analytics?
Your website exists for some purpose. Today, having an ‘online information brochure’ generally isn’t good enough.
Goals, in Google Analytics, help you track conversions, or the number of times somebody does a desired act. If you’re tracking how often people call, submit a form, purchase a product, or give you their email address, you can take steps to learn and improve your site.
Run your site through our Free Website Grader Tool for a comprehensive assessment.