Your Website Needs An Audit!

Scheduled Tune-ups

You take your car in for scheduled tune-ups and to get the oil changed. Why don’t you do the same to your sources of income, your website?

It’s just as important (maybe more important) to check your website and automated systems to make sure everything is working like a well-oiled machine.

Visit Your Website

First thing I recommend is for you to visit your website just like you were a regular visitor. Opt-in to whatever lead generation form you have in place. Make sure you are taken to the correct page.

Now check your inbox, did you receive “email one” in your autoresponder series? If you did, great, if not investigate why not. Also, is that email message still relevant. Follow this procedure until you’ve received your full email sequence. If you don’t have an email sequence in place, this would be good time to implement at least an eight email follow up.

Check Your Links

Make sure you check out all links in your email messages. It is always a good idea to have a call to action in a follow up series; so it is very important to make sure these links go to the location you are expecting them to.

When visiting these links, make sure the pages you’re taken to are still relevant. If these links are promoting a purchase of some sort, it would be good to test the order process. Follow that process all the way through.

Check Your “Order” Process

For example, were you able to successfully complete an order? Did you receive a receipt? Was it formatted correctly? Were you taken to a thank you page or member’s area, and if so could you login without any issues?

Once you have completed that phase of your audit, I would suggest going back to the home page of your website. Look at any links on the site. For example, is there a link to a contact page (and there should be one of these!). If so, does it work as expected, and so forth.

Does Your Site Roll Smoothly?

Keeping with our vehicle analogy, it is recommended you rotate the tires or check the tread and air pressure for obvious reasons. Similarly, you should check that your website is rolling along as planned.

Over time, you may have added things to your website. Items like images or plug-ins and or various scripts for different reasons that could potentially cause your website not to roll as smoothly. As always, Murphy’s Law comes into effect, and things stop working for no apparent reason at all.

A Free Service

On a car you can check the tires and air pressure to see why it’s not rolling smoothly. On your website there is no good way to “check the air pressure”, but you can check to see what is causing your pages to load slowly. To do this, I use a free service called GTmetrix, https://gtmetrix.com

This service will scan your website for page speed. It will show you a grade for each component of your website. In many cases, these are things you may not know are even part of your website. Some of the items it will find such as wrong image sizes, you may be able to correct yourself.

In other areas, you may need the help of your webmaster. If you don’t know why something is happening, that’s the time, you want to hire a good mechanic, i.e. webmaster.

Why is Speed Important?

Why is speed important? Well, first off if it is taking too long for your page to load, your visitor will likely not stick around. Secondly, the search engines do give a higher rank to websites that are speed optimized.

Hopefully, your systems checked out and your speeding right along making sales and growing your business. If you did run into some issues during this audit, consider it a good thing because now that you know about them, you can at least work on getting them corrected (as quickly as possible) and pick up speed to reach the goals you have planned.