We are all focused on health right now, given the circumstances that surround us, as we work globally to do our part to keep our families, friends and neighbors healthy. In this unprecedented time, where the whole world is turning to the Internet as a source of connection to loved ones, a way to continue to do business and a means for schooling our children, your website may be serving an even greater role as the hub of your business communications. This has us thinking that now is a good time to make sure your website is healthy, performing and communicating optimally.

Here are some ways to get started evaluating your website’s overall health and wellness and ensuring that it’s serving your business today and when things start to move forward again.

Review Your Website Analytics
Take a trip through your website analytics to see what pages are performing, where visitors are coming from and where they are going, what keywords they are using to find your website and what they are tapping or clicking on.

You don’t need to be a SEO expert to interpret the basic data and see trends. Knowing how visitors interact with your website can help you make improvements to increase engagement.

Check Your Messaging
Is what your website is saying reflective of your company’s current status? Is the tone consistent and on brand? Over time, as content is added or edited, especially by multiple content editors, the messaging can lose consistency.

Here are some tactics to tackle a content refresh:

- If your website is many levels deep, focus on top level and highly trafficked pages first.
- Ensure that every page has a call to action and the directives are consistent and relevant to the current business climate.
- Step back into the original mindset of how your brand should be viewed by customers online to ensure that the content is within the context of the brand.
- Create a linking structure to connect pages to other related pages in the website. This helps visitors easily find similar information and is a good best practice for SEO.
- Freshen up any outdated content like older blog posts that could be made current with a little updating.

Evaluate the Accessibility of Your Website
An optimized website is an accessible one. Accessibility ensures your website is ADA compliant and available to all audiences including those with disabilities. Having an accessible website contributes significantly to search engine rankings. If your website is a few years old, it is definitely worth investing some time in evaluating its accessibility.

Color contrast, font sizes, using alt tags on images are all factors of accessibility. WebAim provides Wave Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, a browser plugin, that scans web pages and reports errors and alerts. You can then have your web developer make adjustments to correct any red flags.

There are multiple factors to consider with ADA compliancy and accessibility, so take some time to dig deeper in this issue.

Make Sure You’re Mobile-First
While you may be viewing your business website on your desktop or, as of the last few weeks, in your pajamas on your couch with your laptop, many of your website visitors are likely viewing it on mobile.

Google really cares about the performance of your mobile website and has been working towards encouraging better mobile experiences. In fact, newer websites, built within the last nine months, are ranked and indexed by the mobile version first — referred to as mobile-first indexing.

Page speed, load times, the structure of the code, optimized images, browser caching and touchable content and navigation are all factors in mobile performance. You can start by evaluating the page speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights to pick up some hints on how to optimize your mobile site. The load time of your website is a big factor in mobile ranking. Read more about why speed matters in mobile optimization.

Request An Appointment
Inclind’s optimization experts can always help you get an assessment on the health of your website and guide you in making performance improvements. We also offer Drupal and WordPress maintenance plans to keep your website tuned up. Connect with us today. We provide all of our consulting through video conferencing. And, please, stay healthy and safe.