Website Review

Description

We test your website, mobile app or prototype against the most important variables

Analyze specific business objectives

Your business website, just like any area of your business should have a clearly defined objectives and KPIs and you should be performing periodic checks on that performance. Defining the business goals of your website is crucial to know what and why to analyze.

One of the biggest mistakes by businesses large and small is not having clearly defined objectives for your website or focusing more on launching the website and then forgetting all about it.

Analyze current state (Bench-marking)

The second step is to analyze to what extent are these objectives being met. There are lots of tools (with free version available) that helps you grasp the overall performance of your website testing against standard variables such as

• Global Ranking per Category
• Daily Time on Site
• Daily Page View per Visitor
• Top Keywords

Popular Tools:

http://Alexa.com, http://SimilarWeb.com, http://Site-Analyzer.com, http://iwebchk.com, http://nibbler.silktide.com, http://siteworthtraffic.com

Analyze traffic sources

The lifeblood of any website is the visitors, understanding where customers are coming from and the best performing traffic sources is crucial to work on optimizing and investing further on the sources that’s working or not working.

• Search
• Direct Traffic
• Links
• Email
• Paid Ads

Tools: The same tools above also provide data about the traffic sources. You should also be using Google Analytics

User Interface (Design)

Design plays the major role in how your identity perceived, it’s good to analyze your design from the perspective of the points below

• Layout
• Patterns
• Colors
• Imagery
• Typography

Tip: Design is often a creative process, it’s best to perform usability testing as part of a group exercise to get feedback from multiple people and act accordingly.

Tools: Intuition HQ

User Experience & Accessibility

Having a great design is not enough if it’s not accessible to as many people as possible, below are the major points to take into consideration while auditing your website for accessibility and UX.

• Loading speed
• Cross-platform compatibility
• Navigation & Information Architecture

Popular Tools for testing loading speed: Google Page Speed Test, Pingdom, GTMetrix

Popular Tools for testing responsive design: responsivetest.net, Matt Kersley Responsive Test tool

Copy & Promotion

The promotional copy you use for your website is vital both to bring the right audience to your website and also to convert visitors into paying customers and to establish your brand in the market.

Not paying enough attention to the quality of copy will result in your website not being properly indexed by search engines to reach your audience and visitors won’t easily find what they are looking for or be sure you are the right provider/choice for the service/product they are looking for.

Tip: Always get your copywriter to speak to the website visitor. More of “you and your” and less of “us and ours”.

Tools: Google Adwords Keyword Planner, SEO Book, Keyword Density Tool from webseoanalytics.com

Technology (Code)

The quality of code and suitability of technology used in your website is also a main player in the performance of your website.

You’d generally want to test your front-end code to ensure it’s valid according to the HTML/CSS standards and it takes further investigation to check speed and functionality to ensure the back-end technology and code doesn’t require fixes or enhancements

Front end validation: https://validator.w3.org/

Features & Functionality

A contact form, a drop down menu, advanced navigation – all great but can be a double-edged sword if not implemented right and if plenty of unnecessary complex functionality is jammed into your website.

Fixes & Improvements

Often during the review, you’ll discover critical fixes and improvements that can be done immediately. These are issues you should act upon with immediately such as security, out-dated software or plugins.

A sample of what we could find at one of the WordPress websites we analyzed is a popular security issue of having a url in the footer of the website, caused by vulnerability of a plugin.

Suggested Actions

If you a service provider or a website guru, you should mention what the website owner should do to scale, optimize and maintain the performance of their website.

Do you want to receive tips on making your website more competitive? Egypreneur Website Review Series will go through different variables to help you have the sharpest possible online presence in 2017.