Commentary

5 Way To Tell If Your Website Works

The following was previously published in an earlier edition of Marketing Insider.

Aside from the obvious indicators of a bad website, such as only having a single landing page, bad copy, or poor visuals, here are ways to determine if your website is truly the best it should be, both for your business and your users.

Site speed & page speed. Site speed refers to the speed at which the entire site loads as a user maneuvers from page to page. As you know, most users will not wait for a page to load. For this reason, the average website is now expected to load within one to two seconds.

Evaluating and maintaining site and page speeds is essential in organic rankings, user experience(UX), and ultimately, conversions. These attributes can be slowed down due to unnecessary or unused scripts, improper caching, improper sizing of site-wide assets, and even too many https requests.

Page speed refers to the speed at which a specific page loads. Unlike site speed, when testing page speed you focus on optimization of that specific page through things like image size, unused scripts, too many images, and even unused pixels. Both site speed and page speed can be tested using a free tool such as GTmetrix.

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Is it mobile-friendly? While this one is obvious, its importance must be stressed. If you have a website in 2021 and have not incorporated a mobile-friendly build into the design, you will not have much luck obtaining any desired traffic from search engines. When building a website, the entire site has to have a mobile responsive design, which adapts to every screen size, incorporated into the site. To test whether or not you have a mobile-friendly website by Google’s standards, simple input a page URL here

User experience (UX). In addition to slow site and page speeds, a poor user experience can include everything from tacky stock photos to a navigation menu that is difficult to follow. Once a user lands on any one of the pages on your website, the path forward should look and feel seamless. To aid user experience, ensure you have a clearly identified navigation menu, easy to digest content throughout the site, a mobile-friendly site, and unobtrusive pop-ups.

Clear call-to-action. What is your goal for the entire site, along with the specific page where the user has landed? These are the questions you should be asking yourself when designing your website. Without a clear call to action, your users will not understand their own journey on your site, let alone the end purpose. Website users need guidance on where to go next and what to do. Without this, chances are, they won’t keep clicking.

On-site optimization. Optimization of a website and specific pages on that site assists search engines in identifying the information on a page, while providing users with clear information on what the page is about. How search engines interpret the content on a page and how users interact with that page go hand in hand. The more users that visit a page, the more the search engines identify this page as having “authority” over other pages on the same topic. This results in a higher organic placement.

In order to determine whether your pages and website as a whole have proper onsite optimization, use a free tool such as MOZ or Ahrefs. These tools give you a snapshot of webpage performance, keyword rankings, and much more.

1 comment about "5 Way To Tell If Your Website Works".
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  1. John Rokicki from Freelance, August 30, 2021 at 1:07 p.m.

    Should be "5 ways..."

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