We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – a website needs a certain degree of TLC to make sure it works for you.  There’s little point in just putting a website ‘live’, sitting back and waiting for your bank balance to boom.

The most successful webmasters and, therefore, the most successful businesses, will be dedicated to the website development.  Let’s face it, it stands to reason that the more time you spend on your website, the more familiar you become with it, and the more opportunities you then see for your digital marketing strategy.

From time to time, however, it’s always advisable to conduct a health check on your website – a bit like an MOT for your care, to ensure everything is working.  Sounds complicated?  It’s not.

You need to ask yourself the following questions – is what I want to find easy to find on the website? When I find what I want, is all the information correct and present?  And is it straightforward to buy?

You’ll often be amazed at what we’re asking users to do online on your website, whereas the most successful websites are simply personified – after all, why do you think Amazon introduced the ‘1 click purchase’ facility?

And when you do this, you’ll start to notice small errors on your website – broken links, typing errors, wrongly formatted texts, and other little aspects of your content that can be improved. 

Perhaps the most common issue with e-commerce websites is the checkout process, and so it’s always advisable to do a health check on this every month or so.  This is because any website development team, unless your website checking process is 100% robust, may well knock something out when they are putting some new code live – a little piece of code that doesn’t work as a result of some new or modified code, and this can have a knock-on effect throughout the site.  At the same time, most websites rely on a third party payment gateway provider to carry out their secure payments – these portals are constantly updating their systems, and so it’s imperative that your coding and their systems are compatible….all the time.

So, is it worth doing a periodic website health check?  100% definitely – you’ll be amazed at what you find.