What is a Website Quality Analysis?
So, your sister’s best friend’s brother just designed and launched your website - great! You can now check “launch website” off the list of things to do and wait for the phone to ring off the hook… or can you?
How do you know if your website is any good? How do you know that your website is loading for your potential clients? How do you know your website is user-friendly? You can confirm success, discover and correct errors with a Website Quality Analysis (WQA).
In this article we’re going to break down what should be monitored with a website analysis.
A website quality analysis (WQA) is testing and analyzing a website's performance. A website’s performance includes SEO, speed/load time, mobile design, security, accessibility, user experience and traffic.
So, why should you care? A WQA is for everyone and anyone with a website. 91% of unhappy website visitors who are non-complainers simply leave. If your website loads in more than 3 seconds, your potential customer will leave your site and go to your competitor. If your website isn’t user-friendly your potential customer will go to your competitor’s user-friendly site. If your site isn’t on the first page of Google, your competitor is. If your website isn’t legible/user-friendly on mobile, your competitor's site is. Your customers are used to functioning, fast, user-friendly websites so why should your site be any different?
Website Analysis Examples: What To Check For
These are the key details to look at for how to analyze your website effectiveness.
Website SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to how your site will organically rank on Google. SEO starts with how your site is built, making sure your designer/developer used the proper heading tags, using the correct language, making sure all images have alt text etc. Once the site goes live, there is ongoing SEO, with link building, updating content and tags with the trends, reworking content every 12-18 months and so on. You can learn more in our insight about SEO HERE.
Website Speed/Load Time
Website speed is related to SEO, however, it is so important we gave it its own category for this blog post. Your website content should load within 0 - 5 seconds of your potential customer clicking on your website link. If it takes longer than 3 seconds for all content to load (images, videos, links, written content) google reported that most people will leave the site. In a 2019 study, nearly 70% of consumers admitted that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. The highest e-commerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds.
Make Your Website Mobile Design Friendly
With more and more people using their mobile devices to search the web instead of a traditional desktop computer, mobile-friendly websites are more important than ever! In fact, 52.2% of global website traffic in 2018 came from mobile devices. Ericsson Mobility Report on smartphone analytics predicted a 25% increase in mobile traffic by 2025. So this isn’t going away anytime soon! Ensure that your desktop web design auto-adjusts to smaller screen sizes. The site has to look good and function on all devices (desktop, tablet, phone). Think about who is using your site, not everyone has tiny fingers so make sure links and buttons are far apart enough to be individually clicked on. Our last tip for mobile design is to use legible, text. Phones are smaller than you think - use a large font size (12 pixels on at least 60%) of the page.
Website Security Check
Have you ever clicked on a website only to be met with “Your connection is not private - attackers might be trying to steal your information”. That’s alarming! This warning can be corrected with an SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer). An SSL Certificate is one of the many ways to add security to your site. It doesn’t matter if your site is an online store or purely information based, security is a must. An SSL certificate does more than just protection. It goes hand in hand with SEO. It is one of the most important ranking factors for Google. Non-secure websites are automatically pushed to the bottom of the results.
Accessibility
Accessibility is more than just making sure your store has a wheelchair accessible ramp. It also applies to your website too! 22% of the Canadian population has a disability, including blindness/low vision (55% of Canadians require eyeglasses), deafness/hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, and more. Sunday Roast takes these guidelines very seriously, and following these guidelines will often make your site more usable to users in general. We want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to view and understand the sites we create. Why limit your business? We wouldn’t want you to miss out on potential sales because your website isn’t legible. Read more about accessibility in our insight on accessible websites HERE.
User Experience
User experience (UX) describes how people feel when navigating a website, or using a mobile app. It is an extension of your brand. The main goal of UX is to make the end user (your customer) happy. To know if your website ensures customer satisfaction, ask yourself:
Is your website useful - does it provide value?
Is your website useable - is the content on your website accurate? Do the features on your website work every time and as expected?
Is your website desirable - does the website interface make it easy for the customer to get to their end goal (purchase a product, contact you…)?
Does your website visually match your branding? Is there consistency?
Traffic
Keeping an eye on your own website traffic is a must. It’s the biggest hint of all about the quality of your website.
It will tell you how your potential customers use your site, what your most popular pages are and where the potential customer is viewing your site from - are they one town over or one province over? Are they using their phone to look at your site or their computer? These are all important data points, they show you what is and what isn’t working. You should also be looking at your competitors analytics, this will help you identify opportunities for you to provide a better UX or better service. This will help you improve your own website and set a benchmark - are your numbers greater than or less than your competitors numbers? Run a backlink analysis and audit your keywords as well as those of competitors. This will give you a leg up on SEO and help to increase the overall quality of your website.
A website that doesn’t perform as well as it should, will only create more problems and less leads. Customer frustration leads to the following: 13% tell 15 or more people if they're unhappy. Conversely, 72% of consumers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.
Book a discovery call with the Sunday Roast team to find out more about the comprehensive website quality analysis that we can do on your website.
