Your business website is the number one source for information about your business online. So, it pays to run regular checks on the health of your website. This six-point healthy website checklist is an excellent tool for running a health check on your brand’s website. Covering six key areas — including factors like site integrations, design, and content — this website checklist will help you assess the overall health of your website and identify areas that need to be addressed.
1. Basic Integrations
It is crucial that your website has proper integrations with Google’s core webmaster and analytics tools, along with any other integrations needed for further optimization.
Check for:
- Is your site integrated with Google Analytics?
- Is your site integrated with Google Search Console?
- Are your business and website registered through Google My Business?
- Do you have a complete XML sitemap?
- Have you submitted your XML sitemap to Google and Bing?
- Is your site fully SEO-enabled?
2. Site Design
Good design should be intuitive and seamless. Users rarely notice a well-designed website, but they definitely notice when design is critically flawed. Keep users and search engines happy by creating and maintaining a user-friendly site.
Check for:
- Does your site have mobile-friendly design?
- Do all key pages have user-friendly URLs?
- Is your site free of site speed and load time issues?
- Can users easily and intuitively navigate your site?
- Do you have alt-text in place for images and transcripts in place for videos?
- Is your site free of broken links, or missing images/videos?
3. Basic SEO
Every website should have SEO basics in place to make it is accessible to search engines like Google. Poor SEO can strip your site out of Google’s search results, making it difficult for users to find your website, even if they use your brand name when searching.
Check for:
- Has Google properly indexed all pages on your site?
- Is your site fully crawlable by search engine bots?
- Does every page on your site have unique, relevant meta data (page title and meta description)?
- Is alt-text in place so that search engines can understand images?
- Does your site use H1 and H2 headings to make content more readable and navigable?
- Have you used keywords in page titles, meta description, H1s, and content on key pages?
- Do all links contain relevant anchor text?
4. Quality Content
Content is still king when it comes to your brand’s website. Great content keeps users happy, helps your site build quality backlinks, and shows search engines that you’ve invested in a quality site experience.
Check for:
- Does your site’s content pass the “3 R’s” test (Relevant, Readable, and Relatable)?
- Does your site use multimedia (photos, videos, in-site apps) to enhance content?
- Is your site free of duplicated content?
- Is your site free of thin content (content below 100 words)?
*Tip From Our Team*
“Establish your authority on a topic by routinely blogging about it. The unique content that only you can offer will add richness to the user experience, and help you climb to the top of search results.” -Sandy Nichols, Sr. SEO Web Manager, Qiigo
5. Social Media Integration
Social media plays a huge role in modern marketing, and so it’s key that your site is optimized for the social web.
Check for:
- Are share buttons in place for all key social networks?
- Is your site integrated with your active social media accounts?
6. Common Issues
There are a number of common concerns that can cause issues for sites. It is always a good idea to check for these common issues separately, then make any necessary changes.
- Have you checked for and corrected any 404 and 500 errors?
- Have your checked for any 302 redirects and corrected them to 301 redirects?
- Have you run a check on your backlink profile for links that could get your site penalized?
- Do you have an up-to-date disavow file in place for any suspicious backlinks?
