What is a Web Site Health Check and why do I need one?
Many people set up their website either by themselves or through a web development company and they expect it to work flawlessly forever. The truth is, it won’t. Websites can break. This can be due to many reasons, it may be a plug-in has stopped working, the website is out-of-date, it is taking to long to load, or scariest of all, it has been victimised by cybercriminals. Yikes!
Your website is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools available for your business and can enable you to keep trading even when you cant open your doors so it is vital you give it care and attention, if you don’t then don’t be surprised when things go wrong. Unbeknown to you your website starts breaking here and there and sadly you will only become aware of this when you start losing customers and your sales start to decrease. The only option then would be to spend money fixing your website or to build a new one.
You can avoid any of this by having a simple and inexpensive website health check plan. Website health checks are the online equivalent of going to your GP for a regular check-up. There might not be anything obviously wrong on the surface but it’s important to make sure everything is working the way it’s meant to and to raise any concerns before it becomes a serious problem.
Your website can be affected in several ways:
Search Engines
Over time your business grows and changes so you need to adapt your web site so that it stays relevant which may involve removing out of date content or moving content to new parts of your web site. This can cause issues where internal links no longer work and start to produce those annoying 404 Page Not Found errors that nobody wants to see. This can also have a dramatic affect on your SEO as search engines can no longer index your web site content properly causing a drop in your search position and, as a side effect, a loss in the number of your site visitors.
Websites that have old, outdated content generally rank poorly in search engines which is why regularly updating your webpages and images can help boost your rankings in Google. Google’s algorithms are also changing all the time, so you need to be up-to-speed with the latest trends and changes in search algorithms to retain your top rankings.
Slow Loading Speeds
As your web site increases in size you may start to notice performance issues as pages start to take longer to load. There are a number of reasons your webpages are not loading fast enough—could be a server issue, image sizes too big and not optimised, broken links, etc.
People want to get information quickly, so if you’re website is taking longer than forever to load, chances are they will get fed up and look elsewhere. In fact, research shows that 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Backups
The most frustrating thing that could happen to any business owner is to spend time adding crucial data to the web and then losing it all. Technology fails sometimes which is why backups are vital, it is sensible to have a secure location where you can safely backup all of your site’s data so if sadly your website crashes, you can regain access to your data files, photos, webpages, posts etc making it easier and faster to get your site back up and running.
Updates
If you use a WordPress website it needs to be updated regularly especially for security and performance updates. Most WordPress sites use a variety of plugins and themes, which give shape to your website and these require constant updates. Apart from providing additional features and functionality updates can increase your site’s security, covering up vulnerabilities and strengthening your site against cyber attacks. Moreover, updating your plugins and themes will help fix bugs existing in earlier versions, so you won’t have to worry about errors on certain features of your site.
It is important to test updates separately from your main web site as sometimes they can introduce unforeseen issues and break plugins that haven’t been updated to work properly with the new version.
Security
The Internet is not exactly the safest place in the world. Cyber criminals are lurking everywhere, waiting for any chance to exploit your website. Any outdated software can give hackers the access to your system, and once they found their way inside, they will spread malicious content, take personal information and misuse them for monetary gains, and worse of all, shut down your site completely. You may have installed a really cool plugin but found that it’s carrying malware, infecting your website and putting your entire system at risk. To fend off would-be attackers, a website needs to checked and updated regularly.
If all of this sounds complicated, time consuming and expensive Buzy Bee Software Services can help.
Our website health check packages are designed to give you the ultimate service when it comes to website maintenance, plus we provide flexible packages to suit every budget. Whether you need offsite backups, plugin updates, updates for WordPress core files, database optimisation, malware scanning and Google Analytics support, we’ve got you covered.
Our experts can also monitor your web site and inspect it for broken links by, missing content and to check out search engine results to make sure that they always go to the correct part of your web site whenever possible.