Your website is more than just a virtual shop front, it’s the heart of your online presence. Whether you’re running a blog, managing an eCommerce platform, or representing a business, it’s important to maintain a healthy and functional website. Not only will it help to attract visitors, but it will also help with retaining customers and driving growth. Whether you’ve got a well-established eCommerce site or you’re just starting out, our website health checklist can help you increase visitor numbers as well as growth, and the user experience (UX).
In this blog, we’ll explore the key points in our website health checklist to help improve and maintain your website’s health. We’ll look at what may be affecting your website’s health and how you can overcome these issues to improve your website’s ranking and user experience.
When a user clicks onto your website, it must have a fast speed and load time. If the website is lagging, users are unlikely to stick around long and exit the site, straight into the hands of your competitors. Users should also be able to navigate the website smoothly as this will increase both visitor retention and customer satisfaction. Many factors can impact a website’s performance, including hosting, browser caching, image optimisation and traffic volume. By addressing these individual factors, you can help improve the overall performance of your website.
Your website’s security and privacy should be a high priority on your website SEO checklist. It needs regular security updates to help protect the personal data of your visitors. Your website should have an SSL certificate, which helps keep sensitive information secure by encrypting the connection. If website users suspect that their personal data is at risk, they’ll quickly leave the site and may not return.
Having easy to read and accurate information is one of the most important factors in our eCommerce website SEO checklist. The content on your website helps visitors understand what products and services you offer and what makes your brand different from your competitors. The text on your website must be free of errors and laid out in a simple and clear layout that is user-friendly. Bullets and headings can break up large chunks of text and make it much easier for visitors to read through and understand. When compared to a large block of text, the UX is vastly improved with a thoughtful layout.
Good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on your website helps search engines easily understand and index the content. If search engines such as Google can’t access and understand the content on your web pages, it won’t rank them in search results. This will cause you to miss out on visitors and potential growth and revenue. You need to fix broken pages, speed up your website and implement relevant keywords to help search engines crawl and index your website. This is where having the help of an expert SEO agency like ourselves can help you understand and implement these changes on your website effortlessly.
Another important tip on our eCommerce website SEO checklist is having relevant calls to action (CTAs). These help visitors identify content that is relevant to them and let them move through your website more easily. If you want someone to sign up for a newsletter, your services or buy a product, CTAs make this clear.
Clear and relevant headings can also help visitors find important information, while images can break up chunks of text and make the webpage look more appealing. It’s important your website can be accessed on various devices too, including mobile phones, tablets and computers. Your SERP rankings can be impacted if your website is not optimised for mobile devices. When you consider the majority of users will find your website on a mobile and tablet device, you need to ensure the customer experience is flawless.
No matter what strategies you introduce from our website health checklist, you won’t know how much effect they’re having unless you use analytics and tracking tools to see the performance. Google Analytics and other similar tools help break down metrics like bounce rate, CTR, page views, and core website vitals that will help improve your digital strategy. Analytics tools can tell you how many people are visiting your website, which pages are visited most, how long visitors spend on each page, and which pages they visit least. This way you can see what is and isn’t working and make improvements that will benefit the customer experience and, hopefully, your conversions.
For more insights, read our blog where you can discover how to boost your listings with Amazon SEO and what are the 7 best practices for eCommerce website design.
