How to Analyse Your Website

More often than not, a website gets built, the designer and builder get paid and then the website gets left to do its thing.

However, you should be analysing your site regularly to make sure it’s delivering the best user experience for your target market. In turn, delivering the most leads and sales for you.

But, if you’re not used to it, it may be hard to work out what to look at and even where to start when you begin to analyse your website.

So, we’ve written this article to help guide you through the process.

Usability

Is It Secure?

This is a simple thing to check.

Open your site and look in the URL bar, if there’s a padlock next to your website address then your site is secure. If not then you’ll see ‘Not Secure’. This means that you don’t have an active SSL certificate on your site and that access to it will be blocked by certain browsers and internet providers. It’s also a big red flag for Google and will affect your ranking.

To fix this you’ll need to get in touch with your hosting provider.

Is It Fully Responsive?

This is incredibly important for both customer experience and search engine ranking.

If you’re not sure what a responsive website is, check out our other article that explains what it is and why it’s important.

Layout & Intuitive Customer Experience

There’s an 8-second rule with website visitors. If you haven’t enabled your visitor to find what they need in 8 seconds (or less in most cases) they’re outta there!

So, if you were your ideal customer and you visited the homepage of your site for the first time, would you find what you’re looking for quickly and easily?

As well as that, is your site easy for your customer to move around?

Is your navigation bar where you’d expect it to be?

Are the headers clear and concise?

Are there several sub-pages that can be condensed into one good, informative page?

The more a customer has to click around to find what they need the more likely they are to leave your site and go to a competitor.

Are Your Links Working?

Do the links on your site go to where they should? Are any of them broken?

A quick and easy way to check for broken links is to enter your URL into this online checker.

Check The Functionality Of Your Site

Make sure any sign-up boxes and contact forms are working. Check that your search bar is working, that embedded videos are playing and that images are displaying correctly.

If you have an e-commerce site, is the checkout is a simple and fast process? Is it on par with or better than your competitors? Do you have a chatbox or bot on your site? Are they working as they should?

Also, have a look at your site and see if there’s any new functionality that you’d like to add to improve the customer experience.

Are Your Plug-Ins, Platform, theme & PHP Up To Date?

We’re always amazed at how many site owners don’t keep these vital elements up to date.

By allowing the technical elements of your site to get out of date you are not only increasing the risk of your site breaking and going offline, but you’re also leaving the door wide open for hackers.

Technical maintenance should be actioned on a regular basis (ideally weekly/monthly) by either a member of your team or an experienced website manager like, cough, us.

Style

Overall Look

Having a functioning site is only part of having a great site. It also needs to look good. So, does your site look good?

Does it stand out from your competitors? Is it representing your business properly? For example, if you’re offering a top-line, high-quality service your customers will expect a well-designed and polished site.

If it’s not up to scratch it’s time to do some work on your site to bring it up to the level it should be. And if you need help with that just get in contact with us and we’ll be happy to discuss transforming your site and levelling it up.

Is The Text Easy To Read?

Is the text large enough and on a background that makes it easy to read on all devices?

Remember text over images is a tricky beast. It can be done, BUT, they can’t just be slapped together. The image needs to be treated to ensure that it doesn’t clash with the text. And the text will need to be in a colour and format to ensure that it stands out from the image.

Visuals

Do the images and videos on your site make sense based on the service you’re offering? Would the visuals used make sense to your customer without any explanation? If the answer is no to any of these questions you need to do some work on the design of your site to ensure maximum visitor conversion.

Images are key access points in a user’s journey through your site. They are just as important as the copy and features so don’t neglect them and use any old stock shot to fill the space.

Content

Copy

What you say on your site is just as important as how it looks and how it works.

If your site is full of spelling and grammar mistakes it won’t give a good impression to your visitors.

You should also avoid big blocks of text when explaining products and services, as the attention span of a visitor is short. They want to quickly and easily understand what you do and how your product or service fulfils their need.

If you’re not confident in your writing ability then we highly recommend that you hire a professional copywriter to help you create engaging, informative and impactful copy. Trust us, this is not a cost, it’s an investment and can hugely influence the results and conversions you get from your website.

Calls To Action

Does your site have clear calls to action throughout? Are they easy for people to use?

If not then you’re missing an easy way to increase leads from your site traffic.

Up To Date, Useful Content

Content is king, and lots of content is great as it gives people more reason to visit your site on a regular basis.

But, content for content’s sake does more bad than good.

Poor and out-of-date content will increase your bounce rate. Which is the rate at which people visit your site and then leave without visiting another page.

A high bounce rate is not good for your search engine ranking as it shows that you’re delivering a poor user experience and you will be knocked down the ranks.

Go through your content and see if there are bits that can be refreshed and updated or bits that need to be deleted.

Spam

Don’t spam your users with pop-up after pop-up, or pages full of adverts. All you’ll do is create a user experience that will make people quickly leave your site.

Or you’ll create such a strain on your server by trying to load all the ads that your site speed will be affected.

Both of these things will mean people either get frustrated or bored waiting and will go somewhere else to find what they need.

Are You Compliant?

The laws and regulations change relatively infrequently but there have been some pretty major changes in recent years, namely the introduction of GDPR.

With GDPR every website must have a privacy policy outlining how your site captures and uses its visitor’s data. If your site doesn’t have a GDPR policy and cookie notification you need to get them added quickly to avoid a fine.

Search Engine Optimisation

The final and no less important part of analysing your website is search engine optimisation, aka SEO.

Snippets, Meta Descriptions & Alt Text

All your pages should have an optimised SEO title and meta description. Your images should have alt-text, your copy should be keyword optimised and you should have a featured image set for each page.

Bounce Rates & Analytics

If you don’t have Google Analytics on your site get it integrated now.

Go on, go, now.

It’s a really useful tool that enables you to analyse your website and work out where you’re losing visitors. You can clearly see which pages have the highest bounce rate which then tells you that this page is not delivering the content, experience, or answers that your audience is looking for.

This means it’s in need of some work to improve the content and/or functionality and give the user what they’re looking for.

Is Your Website Using Efficient Coding?

This will be a tricky one for you to analyse on your website if you weren’t the one who built it.

But if you did, make sure it’s not using any excessive code or plug-ins. Every piece of code and plug-in has to be loaded by the server every time a page is opened. And the more it has to load the slower it will be.

This leads us onto…

Site speed

Check how fast your site is loading with an online tool such as GTMetrix. This tool will give you a speed grade for a page URL and will show you the areas where you can improve it.

A fast site is a good site in the eyes of your customers and search engines.

Last but not least…

Get someone else to look at it.

Ideally, someone who doesn’t work for your company. Get a fresh pair of unbiased eyes to navigate through your site, read your content and feedback on their experience.

If you’d like a professional eye to analyse your website request an audit from our team today.

We’ll analyse your website from a design, technical and sustainability perspective and send you a 15-minute video where we will show you how to…

✓ Improve your user experience
✓ Improve accessibility
✓ Refine your user journey for better conversion rates
✓ Improve your site’s performance
✓ Improve your SEO
✓ Reduce your site’s carbon footprint