How to Review a Web Site

Updating Your Content

If your content is not up to date, chances are that your site’s visitors will be turned off by it and seek another Web site or brand to get the information they need. Many new companies rarely update the information on their Web site, which can lead to miscommunications and other issues. Your Web site’s content might need a makeover if trends have changed. Keeping your content current is key.

Repairing Broken Links

Google harshly punishes Web sites that have broken links, and a Web site’s authenticity and credibility can come under scrutiny because of such issues. Therefore, it’s important to repair all broken links, update or reroute links, and improve your site’s performance. Broken links are also a sign that your company doesn’t regularly check its Web site and the changes employees are making to it. This could harm the reputation of your company as well.

Making Your Web Site Mobile Friendly

One of the biggest reasons for reviewing the performance of your Web site is to make sure that it is working well on all types of mobile devices. These days, people use their smartphone for all types of tasks. If users must open your Web site on a desktop or notebook computer rather than on their phone, they’ll probably skip the laborious process altogether and opt to use your competitor’s Web site instead of yours. Your Web site must deliver a good user experience across a broad range of smartphones and tablets.

Improving Your Site’s Domain Authority

A Web site’s domain authority is a strong indication and declaration of the site’s ranking on various search engines. A better domain-authority ranking can demonstrate the reach and efficacy of your Web site. It also denotes your audience’s reaction to your Web site. Checking an online domain-authority calculator can help you understand your Web site’s performance in a different way.

Avoiding Ecommerce Glitches

If you have an ecommerce Web site or capabilities, make sure that the checkout and payment processes are seamless and without technical glitches. Adding too many steps to these processes could cause your audience to lose interest in making a purchase, and that would have a direct, negative impact on your online revenues. Therefore, you must review the functionality of your ecommerce platform thoroughly.

Conducting a Competitive Analysis

It is important to conduct a thorough competitive analysis of your competitors’ Web sites before you build your Web site or when reviewing your own site. You need to know how the Web sites of the companies who are competing with yours are doing—relative to both your own Web site’s performance and the success of your online business. Conduct a SWOT analysis of your own Web site’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and those of your competitors’ Web sites to understand their defining features and shortcomings. These insights about your brand’s Web site can help you change your UX strategy to meet current trends and be successful in the competitive marketplace.

Protecting Your Web Site

Your Web site’s security should be one of your biggest investments. This is the age of data, and your customers will trust your company only if you have the ability to keep their data safe and secure from hackers and other trouble-makers. If your Web site is not secure, your customers won’t trust your online platform, and they might not complete their online transactions on your site. Whenever you’re reviewing your Web site, you need to understand what upgrades are currently necessary to protect your site. Implement those changes to improve your site’s security and stay ahead of your competitors.

Is Your Site Achieving Your Goals?

A company’s vision is the driving force behind its business goals and all the actions it takes to achieve them. Those goals should drive every change in your UX strategy. You need to make sure that your Web site is doing exactly what it needs to do to achieve your business goals. Conducting a Web-site review lets you know whether your site is on its way to fulfilling its destiny.

Many companies conduct Web-site reviews every year to make sure that their Web site and brand values are in sync. When conducting a Web-site review, consider all the factors that I’ve discussed in this article. Make sure that you’re optimizing your Web site to ensure that it has maximal impact on the overall growth of your brand.

If you’re planning to conduct a review of your own Web site, don’t forget to first define your strategic UX design goals. Work on moving them forward every year. Your Web site needs to achieve both your long-term goals and your short-term, or annual, goals. So it is important that you keep all these individual goals in mind and measure how far you’ve progressed as a company.