Perform a health check of your website in 5 steps

Whether your website has been around for 6 months or 8 years, it is important that you regularly review its performance, to know what can be improved or what needs to be changed. There are several ways of assessing the quality and the effectiveness of your website, and I will give you 5 simple steps to do so:

1. Review your website statistics with Google Analytics

The first thing you can do to know how your site is doing is to look at your statistics. This step can be very quick and will give you a really good idea of your performance: how much traffic you get, which content is worth publishing, etc..

2. View your site as a first timer

When we spend a lot of time working on something, we usually become blind of a few details. How many times have you written a short note only to realize once you sent it that there was a major typo in it? With the same approach, try to put yourself in the shoes of a new visitor, and note everything that you experience and feel as you browse the site. Do you struggle to find the menu, are there too many clicks to go from one section to another, is the site really slow to load, etc..?

3. Review your objectives

You don't have a website just because it's a trend to be on the web. Your website is a great tool to promote your company or your brand, it's here to work for you, it has some clear objectives to reach: increase the number of leads, help sell a book, etc.. Review your objectives and see if there are any actions you can take today to reach them faster. For example, if the main objective of your site was to get people to register to your newsletter, but your list is not growing well, you might want to declutter your site and make this one call to action very obvious on the site "register to our newsletter".

4. Check your social performance

Statistics are a great way to check how well your site is doing, but interactions from your readers are just as valuable. If you added some social sharing buttons on your site, check how many times people shared your content. Which pages are shared most? That will tell you the type of content they like. Also look at the number of comments on your blog if you have one, never forget to read through them. Conversations that happen there are often just as interesting as the post itself.

5. Don't forget the design

Design to me is still a very important part of the equation. I get turned down immediately when I land on an ugly site, or one that looks like the sites we created years ago. Not everyone is like me, but it pays to review your design and keep it tidy, modern and in line with your branding. After all, it's well accepted that the state of your reception area says a lot about your office, so what about your website? You send a strong message there if you don't put any effort in your site's look and feel.

So roll up your sleeves, get to work on your site, and let me know what you find out!