Website Health Check

What Our Website Health Check Covers

At Watermark Design, our comprehensive website audit looks at all the factors that have the largest impact on your website’s performance. Our website audit checklist makes it easy to see where your site is performing well and where a few adjustments could improve site performance. Here’s a closer look at what our website audit covers.

Overall Site Performance

Your overall site performance measures how quickly the pages of your website load in a user’s web browser. Studies have shown that the average web user waits just two seconds for a site to load. Any longer than that, and they navigate away to find a site that will provide them with information faster.

You can test your website site speed with free tools like Google SpeedTest Insights Tool. This will give you a good starting point. With more and more people using mobile first it would be a good idea to also test your website with Google Developers mobile-friendly test tool to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Generally, Google considers faster-loading websites as higher-performing websites. In your site health check, Watermark will run a speed test that will check your website’s page load time, time to start render, time to title, and DNS lookup time, among other metrics. We will also look at how long users stay on your website and how many leave your site without clicking on anything.

Core Web Vitals

When you get a physical, a nurse checks your height, weight, pulse, and blood pressure. A core web vitals audit is a physical for your website. It looks over several factors that give a baseline picture of your site’s health. A website vitals check will look for improperly sized images, unused JavaScript, chained critical requests, and other technical details that may be affecting your site’s performance.

The health of your website’s vital signs help Google understand whether or not your site is a high-quality or low-quality source of information. When too many vital signs are poor or not working properly, your site’s performance on Google will suffer. Watermark Design site health check will uncover any core web vitals that need improvement.

Crawlability

To find and index your website, Google sends out bots called web crawlers to skitter all over your website, reading the content and following the links. Then, they bring all that data back to Google’s servers to be indexed.

If your website has good crawlability, Google’s bots have an easy time finding and reading content and following all your links. But if your website is full of dead or broken links or unclear copy, the bots will struggle to access your website’s content. This makes it difficult for Google to index the content of your website and analyze its relevance to users. This results in a poor crawlability score.

Watermark’s website health check will perform a test of your website’s crawlability. If the bots can work through your website with ease, your site will score well. If they get stuck, we will recommend ways you can improve your site’s crawlability and therefore its performance on Google.

Internal Links

Internal links between your website’s pages play an important role in the crawlability of your website. Without them, Google’s bots (and human users) have a difficult time finding content on your site. Broken links pose the same challenge to bots and users. To Google, broken internal links are a huge red flag. Sites with several broken internal links often rank poorly in Google search results.

Checking your site’s internal links is one of the items on our website audit checklist. We will give your entire site a thorough checkup and flag any broken links. If your site has few or no internal links, we’ll flag that, too.

HTTPS/SSL Certificate

Have you noticed that most websites now have HTTPS protocols rather than HTTP protocols? That’s because Google has started ranking sites with HTTPS protocols higher than those with simple HTTP protocols. HTTPS protocols encrypt the connection between your device and the server of the website you’re visiting. Without an HTTPS protocol in place, any information you send between your computer and the website is not secure and could be stolen. HTTPS protocols are not only safer, they’re faster than the old HTTP protocols. This can help with your overall site performance.

Fortunately, updating your website to HTTPS is simple. If your Watermark Design website health check uncovers that you’re still using the old HTTP protocol, we can help you update your site to HTTPS by installing an SSL certificate on your site. This is a digital certificate available through your web hosting company that authenticates the identity of your website and allows encrypted connections.

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Website Health Check

As you can see, a website health check can help you understand why your site may not be performing well on Google. Armed with this information, you can work with a web designer or developer to make improvements to your site’s health that will improve not only your site’s search engine performance, but your website’s overall user experience.

If you’re trying to perform a website audit on your own, know that the experience can be frustrating and time-consuming if you’re not an SEO pro. Running an effective audit requires know-how and the right tools. You will also want to find someone with the technical expertise to make the changes your website health check recommends.

SEO Monitoring Benefits and Costs

A website health check is a great first step in improving your site’s user experience and search engine performance. To continue to improve your site’s visibility and ranking on Google, you will want to continuously monitor your site’s SEO performance. While there is a cost to these services, SEO monitoring and regular updates to your site can help your website get found and convert more users into customers.

Watermark Design can provide ongoing SEO monitoring services for your website. We can also provide periodic site audits on a monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual basis to ensure your site is performing optimally.

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