It’s 2017, and we’re hurtling ever farther into the future-scape depicted in sci-fi movies. Today, we can edit human genes, use algorithms to predict tsunamis, and fly spaceships into the sun. Despite this progress, nearly half of all small businesses don’t even have a website.
First off, having a business website is no longer a luxury. Every small business needs one, and once you do it’s critical to take some simple steps to optimize it so consumers can discover your business and, hopefully, become paying customers. But once you’ve built a website, how do you know if it’s doing its job?
The Website Highlights feature in Womply’s dashboard provides a simple checklist to see if your site is performing well. This feature evaluates the health of your website on 10 criteria and provides a score based on what’s working and what’s not. When fixes are in order, Website Highlights gives you one-click access to directions and tips.
It’s helpful to think about website health in three phases: basic performance, business utility, and search engine optimization (SEO). We’ll tackle each of these items in separate posts, beginning with the basics.
Business Website Performance
There are varying degrees of “performance” for your business website. For now, we’re focused on what’s necessary at a bare minimum so customers can find and experience your business online:
- Is your website actually up and running? There are countless reasons why your website might go down, from broken hardware (like routers) to your hosting service experiencing a hiccup. It’s important to know if your site is “live” at all times because an outage costs you up to $427 per minute. Website Highlights let’s you know if you’re site is down so you can get back up and running quickly.
- Is your site reachable with and without the “www” in the URL? Consumers won’t work very hard to find your website if they receive a page error when they type in your URL. Your customers could receive such an error if you haven’t set up a 301 redirect for the non-www version of your URL. Website Highlights lets you see at a glance if your redirect is working.
- Is your website mobile-friendly? More people view websites on mobile devices than desktop or laptop computers. Be sure to make your business website mobile-friendly. Not sure if it is? Website Highlights will tell you.
- Do you have more than 30 days to renew your domain? If you don’t keep up with registering your website’s domain, it could cost you a late fee or even result in someone else purchasing your address. Website Highlights gives you a heads up when you’re within 30 days of needing to renew.
Check back later for Parts 2 and 3 (utility and SEO) in our series about business website performance. With Womply you can keep tabs on your website’s health and much more. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!