Keeping an eye on the health of your website enables you to nip any performance issues in the bud before they potentially lose you money.
You might be surprised at the things that can go wrong with your site! This includes data loss due to corrupted data or cyberattacks, slow load speeds due to broken links or page errors, and falling search engine rankings – to name a few.
There are no set rules around monitoring your website, but a good place to start is to give it a regular monthly check-up.
So how do you keep your site in good nick? Here are our top health tests.
1. Test page speed loading times
Free online tests such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights can provide a very quick analysis of your site and identify issues that need your attention. For example, it could be that your images are too large and taking too long to load, or your site has broken links or page errors.
In some cases, slow speeds can be due to server issues, in which case it might be a good idea to switch to a new hosting service.
2. Check how your site appears in search
SEO can suffer if your site is hard to navigate, slow to load, full of errors, lacking appropriate keywords or has low-quality content.
To improve your site’s SEO, follow the instructions in Google’s SEO Starter Guide, or speak to your web developer or an SEO expert.
3. Test for mobile responsiveness
More people use a mobile device than a desktop computer these days for online searches. So make sure to regularly check how well your site is loading on mobile devices and to do adjustments where necessary.
Google has a quick test you can run to check how mobile-friendly your site is.
4. Look out for new software releases
Website software such as WordPress, plugins, and themes should be updated as new improved versions are released. Updating helps your site to function properly, maintain high security and performance, and can help improve SEO. Failing to update to new releases can result in poor performance, compromised security, and possibly website bugs! You may be able to save yourself a bunch of time and stress by enabling auto-updates – check if your site has this option available. So, if you haven’t run an eye over your website’s performance lately, why not give these four tests a try?
Speak with the team at Sanctuary Labs to find out more