Your website is your brand’s digital window, so optimising it for the audience that you are targeting is crucial. Accurately representing your brand values and defining your proposition clearly is vital now more than ever with the past 18+ months driving significantly more of us online.
Ofcom has found that since March 2020, UK adults are spending, on average, over a quarter of their waking day online (4 hours, 2 minutes).
Making purchases online increased dramatically in 2020 in comparison to the previous year, and a recent study by Credit Karma revealed that 70% of Brits now prefer shopping online or on mobile, up from below half pre-pandemic.
With Christmas under 2 months away, many consumers are sure to make a large portion of their purchases online – if you feel your website isn’t up to scratch, now is the time to have your website acting as the best possible ‘shop window’ for your business.
How well optimised your site is for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) should also be a key part of your website health check – after all, it will be hard for consumers to find your company’s website if it isn’t featuring highly for relevant terms searched in search engines. Simply put, a website that is ‘healthy’ and performing well is a website which clearly demonstrates who you are and what you do, and drives conversions all at the same time. It may seem somewhat daunting to get your website ticking all of these boxes, so below you’ll find some thinking points for measuring the performance of your website:
Brand perception
What customers believe a product or service represents
Enhance the way your brand is perceived by ensuring your website has:
- Clear and eye-catching brand identity
- Appropriate imagery
- Engaging and informative copy
- Navigation menu with relevant pages
By understanding what your customers are seeing and making sure that this tallies with your brand strategy, you will see a positive impact on traffic and conversions.
User experience (UX)
The customer journey
Think about how well users can navigate through your site. The best User Experience fulfils the wants and needs of the user, and will increase your traffic, conversions and customer base by doing so.
More than 65% of people prefer to look at a site with purposeful user experience over a standard webpage, according to HubSpot.
With most people now using their smartphones to search the web, ensuring your site is optimised for mobile use is paramount.
Tech overview
How is your website performing?
The following are considerations to make in terms of the performance of your website:
Page speed - Ensure delay is kept to an absolute minimum when a user loads up your website. Slow loading time can force your site to be held back in search results.
Site crawl - Keep on top of crawler issues by performing regular site crawls. A site crawl will show various crawler, metadata, content and 404 errors which require fixing. Any of these issues can have a detrimental effect on your SERP rankings.
Code validation - Ensure the technical quality of your web pages by carrying out code validation (or markup validation as it's also known). Use online code validators to make sure that your site has clean code that search engines can extract the right information for someone searching online.
Security - Having an SSL certificate is vital for customer security and improved search placement. An SSL certificate ensures information, data transfer and log ins are secure.
Carrying out regular health website checks is key to ensuring maximum digital reach. If you have concerns that your brand’s website isn’t performing as well as it should, then get in contact with us today for your complimentary website audit. We will inspect how your brand is perceived, what sort of experience a user will have, and how well it is performing technically. We will also offer advice and pointers on how best to make website improvements.
Fill out our simple form to request your website audit here.