5 Areas You Must Audit on Your Website

Your website is your storefront online. It needs to be flawless and be a selling machine for your business. There are some areas of your site that are critical that must be reviewed often to ensure your website is working for you.

Below, I have listed 5 of these areas for you:

1). Contact Forms

One problem I see continually, and I hear a lot of complaints about, are website contact forms that do not function well on both computers and mobile devices. When people try to contact a business and the form doesn’t work, trust is lost. Lost trust equals lost income.

When you have a website made everything may work perfectly in the beginning, but with server updates and website code updates contact forms can break or function incorrectly. No business can afford to miss opportunities to pick up new clients/customers.

So take a run through your website with a computer (preferably a Mac and a PC) and also test mobile devices to make sure all your forms are functioning correctly.

2). Truth in Content

Often in business things like policy, services and services options change, but businesses often forget to update their website content and the wrong information is being fed to current and potential clients. When this occurs there is often conflict that arises and it causes problems on both sides.

Take some time to review your home page, service pages, FAQ page(s) and policy pages especially. Make sure your site reflects what is current within you business and avoid confusion with clients and customers.

3). Payment Pages or Systems

Many businesses offer options to make payments on their website. It is critical that you check and double check these areas often. Again, changes made to servers or website code could cause conflicts with payment options.

Whether you have a payment system or something as simple as PayPal code, go through the entire payment process and make sure everything is working correctly.

4). Cross Browser Performance

Not everyone uses the same browser. The most common are Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, but there are others. Sometimes inexpensive website creation tool creators and inexperienced Web designers do not understand that they have to “cross browser check/test” websites to ensure they function and display correctly on each browser.

Now, in addition to multiple browsers, websites must function and display correctly on mobile devices, too (smartphones and touchpads).

Businesses lose potential clients when their sites don’t work well for users. You can download browsers and check your site, but keep in mind that there are different versions of each browser as well. Sometimes it is helpful to ask friends and family to take a peak on their devices and let you know any problems they see.

There are free cross browser testing tools on the net; one recommended tool is Adobe’s BrowserLab.

5). Page Load Time

Nothing is more irritating than a webpage that loads slow. Tests and studies have found that users typically do not wait for a slow page to load and they leave the site. Every time that happens, businesses lose potential income.  It is important to check all of the pages on a website to see how fast or slow they load on different devices.

Google offers a PageSpeed Insights tool that will tell you what issues they see when testing your website for page speed, but there are others out there that can help you as well.

If you find that your site or page(s) are loading slow there are many possible reasons for it. Three of the causes I see often are images that are too large, bad coding/scripts, and servers that are over capacity. If you find a problem talk to your web developers ASAP and get the ball rolling on fixing this issue.

Website Checklist Photo via Shutterstock

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