10 Point Website Inspection

We do a lot of website analysis here at HTMLfx.  Every new client, that has an existing website, undergoes a technical audit to make sure it is up to current web standards.  It is extremely important for any business to have a high performance website.  We are not just talking about speed, although that is also important, we are also talking about ability to convert visitors to clients on any device.

The following list are the main areas we look at when analyzing a webpage.

1. Overall Design – We look at the site to make sure it is visually appealing.  That it has enough information to communicate, but not so much that it is overwhelming or confusing. We find that sites that look good have a higher conversion rate.  We call this designing trust.
2. Messaging & CTAs – Does your website quickly convey what you do, why you are the one to do it, what you want your users to do and how they can do it?  If any of these questions is no, there is a problem.  Your website should be able to get a portion of your users to do something.  I should be able to determine your Internet marketing goals by looking at your homepage.  The presence of high contrast buttons that say something like LEARN MORE, BUY NOW, GET STARTED, etc.
3. Content Analysis – Does  your website have content worthy of linking to?  Do you have a great product or service?  Do you have information that no one else has?  Do you update your site with great content regularly? If you cannot say yes to at least one of these items, then your website is not very valuable and most likely will NOT perform well.
4. Responsiveness – This is how well your site performs on different size screens.  From super wide desktop displays to mobile devices.  It is important to make sure your site renders a usable site on all devices.  Google will penalize your site for not being mobile friendly.
5. Usability – We look for basic usability when review websites.  This is achieved through effective navigation, font sizes, color contrasts and web standards.  Making sure images have alt and title tags will not only get you Google points, but will also help visually impaired users use your site.
6. Contact Information – Does your site have contact information easily available.  Choosing how you want customers to contact you is important.  If you do not have someone to answer the phone, then your email address or contact forms should be linked to in the header and the footer.  I do recommend you have a phone number with voicemail even if you do not have someone to answer the phone at all times.  It makes customers feel more comfortable when they fell like they can call someone.   I recommend having a live-chat feature as well.  Sites with live chat convert much higher then sites that do not offer this feature.
7. Search Engine Optimization – This item is worthy of it’s own checklist, but for a basic analysis, we just quickly make sure the site has the appropriate Title, Description, use if header tags and robots.txt files that search engines use to decide what your page is about they can determine where you should rank their SERPs.  We also review how much content is on each page and whether or not the content matches the tags.  There are MANY other ranking factors, but the basics is all we cover in this audit.
8. Social Integration – We look for social icons that link to your social accounts.  We look for social sharing icons.  We also check for OpenGraph tags so you have some control over what is displayed when someone shares your page.  This is VERY important as it lets you put a clear message, with CTAs and a graphic that communicates what your page is about and encourages other users to visit your site.
9.  Render Speed\Page Load Time – How fast your page loads is directly related to bounce rate and search engine placement (SERP).  Google will start penalizing your site at around 3 seconds. There are a lot of ways to fine tune your website including adding caching, reducing image sizes and removing items that have a weight greater then their overall value.
10. Presents of Analytic data – If you are not tracking your site traffic, how can you tell if your website is performing for you?  It is mind blowing how many business have websites and are NOT tracking their traffic statistics.

We use these points to generate an overall score and then make recommendations.  We can also provide a proposal to execute our recommendations.

If you would like us to audit your website, please provide us with your domain name and your email address.