The Most Vital Website Health Signs you Should not Ignore
Youâve heard it said time and again that your website is your biggest sales agent, and the truth is that is no myth.
There are millions of companies, from hobby side hustles to massive corporations, who make just about their entire incomes based on their websites. It could be that they sell their products and services solely via their site or that they are just bringing in the majority of their leads through the site, but the fact is, their websites are their biggest money-makers.
And as you could imagine, if the website were to suddenly start performing poorly or be ignored to such an extent that the site was to completely break, the company would end up losing a huge portion of its income.
While this might sound like a bit of doom and gloom, the thing is that site breakdowns happen a lot more often than you think, and generally because a site is just neglected.
When the day-to-day business is being taken care of, marketing and the company website are normally just left to do their thing. But over time, without maintenance and without giving some thought to things like the age of the theme and which plugins are being used, websites go from being healthy, and fully functional, to sluggish and even unusable. In this article, we discuss the most vital website health signs you should not ignore.
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Signs that your website needs Attention
Prevention is better than cure
The best thing to do would be to create a maintenance calendar and to stick to it. You could commit to weekly checks or monthly tasks, or you could ask your website team to take the lead in creating such a plan.
Either way, getting serious about the maintenance and making the effort to stay ahead of the trends and work towards ensuring that the site is working as it should is the best way to prevent the site from becoming so unhealthy that it ends up costing you money rather than making you money.
Signs your Site Needs Attention
You donât need to be a website design pro or keep up with every change in the industry to have a fully functional website that works for both you and your clients. You just need to make sure that you know the vital website health signs that should never be ignored.
Links are broken
Broken links donât happen often but they will happen if there are many changes to the websiteâs pages and you have forgotten where you have placed the links to those now no longer existing pages. Broken links are not just bad for SEO, they are also pretty terrible for the overall user experience, as they wonât make for a good experience which can in turn reflect badly on the company.
You should make a habit of regularly checking links, especially when you are changing page URLs, and you should also make use of a plugin that can identify broken links and perhaps even redirect them automatically.
Your plugins arenât updating
When you leave your website for long enough without maintenance, all of the plugins will be outdated, unless you have enabled automated updates. And even then, the automatic updates can for some reason or other fail to update. The result of outdated plugins is a website that is lacking certain necessary features, such as the shopping cart, an increased vulnerability to being hacked, and a website that simply shows an error when someone clicks on the link when they find the site on a search engine.
The easy fix for this would be to log in in occasionally and check that the plugins are up to date. While you might trust your web design team to do this, not all do, so it is best to check it yourself.
The website has a crawl error
The reason why websites can bring in the money has to do with the fact that they are easy to find on the web. And for the site to be easy to find, the various search engines will need to be able to crawl the site.
Initially, when the site is launched, it will (it should) eventually be found by Googleâs spiders, which will go over the site and determine where it should be ranked on a search result page. But over time, crawl errors can crop up for whatever reason, and this will cause the site to drop in ranking. To avoid this, you need to be constantly aware of what is happening on the backend of your site, and you should also make sure that you add the site to a Google Search Console account so you can keep track of these things.
There are too many 404 errors
A 404 error means the page cannot be found or loaded and when you have too many of these popping up on your website, your online marketing as well as your brand might end up suffering, as neither Google nor your clients will be able to find the page. Often such errors crop up when you have deleted a page or an image but youâve not completely removed it, i.e. the link to the page is still in places on your website. These errors will also happen when you have moved the webpage content to a different page, and changed the URL.
The website is not mobile friendly
One of the biggest reasons why every website should be mobile friendly is because most web searches come from mobile phones. And although this is the case, since all websites are built on laptops or desktops, and as such look great for such devices, the mobile aspect is often forgotten. A website that is not mobile friendly can be detrimental to the websiteâs health, so be sure your site translates well on a mobile device. And since plugins and themes can change quite often, and end up altering the site layout, occasionally checking this aspect of your design is one way to stay on top of things.
By staying in the know and taking a keen interest in one of the most important marketing and money making aspects of your business, you wonât have to worry about your website becoming unhealthy.
If you liked this article you might also be interested in, how to create the best backlink strategy, and, the importance of finding quality backlinks for SEO.
