Website Checklist 101 to Amplify Your Brand and Business Impact

Building, launching, and maintaining a website is a complex job. From content to designing, marketing, and testing, a lot goes into making it functional. But the job isn’t done here. You need to ensure that your website works flawlessly to create a positive impact on your business.

And for that, you should conduct regular health checks on your website. Website health checks can help diagnose website problem areas and enable you to fix them before they become a serious issue. With a website checklist, you can avoid losing sales and spending hefty amounts on website repair.

In this blog post, we will look into 6 key areas to optimize your site for smoother workflows, better traffic, and higher engagement.

Website Checklist 101

Here are the vital aspects of a website that can make or break your business’s online presence.

1. Content – Attract, engage, and persuade the audience to take action
2. Design – Increase engagement with UX and design
3. Testing – Improve functionalities, and minimize bounce rates and downtime
4. Marketing – Drive traffic, qualify leads, and increase brand awareness
5. Tracking – Monitor and analyze the user journey seamlessly
6. Technical – Conduct an audit for optimal performance

Content

Accurate, understandable, and well-organized content is the key to winning the hearts and minds of audiences. Always ensure that your content is informative and engaging, and helps the audience solve their problems effectively.

• Spelling and Grammar: Check for capitalization, spelling variation (UK/US spelling), tense, and punctuation marks.
• Context and Layout: Ensure that the typography and text placement is uniform, and the content is relevant to your audience.
• Readability and Engagement: Sentences should be short, crisp, and simple, and have a good flow to them.
• Test Content and Hidden Copy: Make sure to delete alt text, transcription, and paragraphs saying ‘Lorem ipsum dolor sit’.
• Proofread: Get everything proofread multiple times to get different points of view.

Design

A picture says a thousand words. With audiences paying more attention to the aesthetics and user-friendliness of websites, design is of utmost importance to increase user engagement.

• Loading Speed: Check page sizes and loading time. Optimize all page elements.
• Compatibility: Make sure that your website pages render well in common browsers and provide an optimal viewing experience across a range of devices.
• 404-Page: If a user requests a non-existent page, then your 404-page must provide useful information to redirect the user to other pages that they may be interested in.
• Visuals: All images should be compressed for the web and have consistent size and quality. The display text should render over the image correctly and every stock image used must be licensed.
• Navigation: Test the navigation on your website for a casual visitor. Check that on-site search works properly and leads the user to a relevant page.
• User Friendly: Make sure your website is mobile-responsive, well-formatted, and has clear calls-to-action.

Testing

Testing helps you review your website for potential bugs, security, usability, and performance. To confirm that your website functions at optimal standards, run these tests.

• Performance Check: Load test your website to monitor its behavior at peak time. Test its breaking point and recovery time from a crash caused due to high traffic.
• Website Security: Make sure that sessions expire automatically after prolonged user inactivity. Unauthorized access and restricted file download should not be permitted.
• Database Testing: Check for errors shown while executing queries. Fine-tune the response time, if required, and ensure that data integrity is maintained while creating, updating, and deleting data from the database.
• Cross-Browser and Broken Link Check: Check your website on multiple browsers and verify that all links work properly, especially if you’ve built custom functionalities.
• Usability Testing: Carry out a usability test for site navigation and content. Ensure that everything is visible and orderly.

Marketing

Marketing is a key determinant for the survival and success of your business. It involves a variety of aspects from search engine optimization to social media marketing, email marketing, blog posts, and lead capture forms that should be refined from time to time.

• Online Visibility: Make your website SEO-friendly by focusing on keywords, meta titles and meta descriptions, as well as link building.
• Form Testing: Check that users receive an auto-response email and arrive at a thank-you page with relevant content after submitting forms on your website.
• Social Media: Register your business’ presence on social media and link your website to your accounts. Build an active presence on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
• Directories and Email Signatures: Submit your site to as many business directories as possible and include the site URL in your email signature.
• XML Sitemaps: Add a sitemap .xml file to your root directory to help search engines easily index and crawl your site pages.

Tracking

Tracking allows you to monitor site performance and understand what’s working and what needs to be improved. There are many free and paid tools available with which you can analyze your website.

• Analytics: Measure the conversion rate of your website and track the goals associated with each conversion type, by using a web analytics tool.
• A/B Testing: Conduct controlled experiments with two variants of your website to understand which elements impact user behavior and why.
• Google Search Central: Know what common search terms your website is displayed for through Google Search Central.
• Heatmap Testing: Use Heatmap testing to learn what your users really do on your website.

Technical

Last but not the least, there are some technical aspects of your website that need to be taken care of. Make sure that your platform and plug-ins are always up-to-date and run on the latest versions.

• Secure Certificate: If you run an eCommerce website or use encrypted pages for user privacy protection, add your SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate on your website.
• Site Backup: Back your website up to avoid loss in case it runs off the database. Also, make sure you test your database regularly.
• RSS Link: Include an RSS link to your feed in the browser’s address bar if your website has a blog or newsreel that users can subscribe to.
• Page Redirection: Although page redirection is mainly used for site replacement, check that all your pages have correct URLs and the redirects are intentional.

Summary

Website maintenance and upgradation is an ongoing process. It may look overwhelming in the beginning but checking one box at a time can make a huge difference to your website’s overall performance and impact.

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