If you have a website, whether it be for your business, or personal use, there are some key aspects to keep an eye on as the lifecycle of your website continues. These 4 things were going to go through should give you a good understanding of whether your site could use a tune up or not.
There are countless aspects of a website to keep an eye on and keep updated, but we’re just going to look at these 4 today. Check it out! And comment on our post regarding this blog with your thoughts!
Let’s dive in.
Responsiveness
Responsiveness is when your website scales to the appropriate size to fit the screen of the device it is being viewed on. Essentially, this makes sure that your site still looks cohesive, optimized, and readable on all devices. Responsiveness is becoming more and more important as the use of cellphones and tablets becomes more popular. We have all had experiences when you click on a website on your phone, and it displays the full desktop version of the site, everything seems too big for your screen, it’s hard to read, and can be frustrating. When evaluating your site, keep an eye on the responsiveness, test your site on multiple devices to see how to responds and scales.
Load Times
Load times…I mean, what else is there to say really? Having a site that takes a long time to load can, in some cases, cause your consumer to feel like the site is unsafe. It can cause frustration and can even make potential consumers reconsider using the site for the function it provides. In fact, we recently did a poll on our Twitter account asking how long someone would typically spend waiting for a site to load before they left. We had mixed results between 10-20 seconds, and 20-30 seconds. Going back to our first point, when you are testing your loading times on your site, test it on multiple devices as well. Sure, sometimes the internet is just slow, or someone has a bad connection, nothing we can do about that. But other times, our sites can become outdated, or clunky due to a lack of maintenance. Be sure to keep an eye on this one, it will help make sure the consumers and potential consumers of our sites have the best possible experience!
Landing Pages
Your landing page would be the page that the consumer would “land” on when they click on a link to your site or click on a link you provide as a part of a promotion. Landing pages can often be the first impression we make on people. You want to make sure your landing page is easy to navigate, not confusing, and if it’s a landing page for a marketing promotion, that it leads to the page that was mentioned in the promotion. All landing pages should be very easy to navigate, aesthetically bonded to your brand, and operates effectively.
Outdated Software and Website Elements
Outdated software can cause multiple issues on your website. It can cause it to run slower, which in turn, could potentially push consumers away from it. Outdated software can also hurt your websites SEO (Search Engine Optimization) placement, which in todays day and age, can be a huge factor in being successful. One of the most important reasons to update your software/elements on your site is because they can be a major security risk. When software is updated, often times security features can be updated as well. When you are using an outdated version of the software (or an outdated software as a whole) you could be missing out on some crucially important security updates. These updates can give additional security and safety against cyber attacks, which may taget your data or site as a whole.
There we go! 4 things to look for when you are evaluating your website. Like we said earlier, there an numerous aspects and things to look for when evaluating or updating your site, but these are some easy to spot ones to look for right away.
As always, if you have any questions about these things, please reach out to us!