It’s important to make sure that your website is healthy
There are a couple of reasons:
- With the web and standards constantly evolving, sites can end up out of date before we know it.
- Websites are built using multiple components, which are often updated or need to be updated in order to work optimally.
This means that if websites aren’t looked after, especially if you’re using a CMS (content management system) platform such as Wordpress then there can be components conflicts or security vulnerabilities. Sometimes it can also be as simple as having recent content in a news section.
There are a few aspects to a health check
This can all be very confusing, so I have listed a few importance points that I consider at when doing a website check up:
- whether themes and plugins are up to date (more specific to CMS – such as Wordpress and Drupal)
- whether websites meet a minimum accessibility standard (accessibility compliance is a legal requirement in the UK)
- whether the server version is up to date
- whether the site looks live (i.e. is up to date)
- whether the site has any errors on it (these will always catch up with you)
- whether the site has a good SEO score
- whether the site has good UX
These are important for all websites, whether your site is built on a CMS (e.g. Wordpress/Drupal), a drag and drop builder (e.g. Wix/Squarespace)or is hand coded (built not using any platform but rather directly in PHP/HTML/Jekyll etc.)
It’s really simple to get started
- Add your website URL to the form on the this page
- Add an email address I can use to contact you
- Let me know if there’s anything specific that you’re looking for
That’s it! From there, I’ll get in touch with you and I’ll check your site out. I’ll give you my report with no strings attached. Following on from the check, I’ll give you my recommendations which you can absolutely choose to follow or not and I would of course be thrilled if you were to ask me to do any of the work for you, making sure to prioritise the work that would make the most impact. However if you’d like to hand it over to someone from an in-house team, a regular freelancer or a digital agency then that is fine as well.
I believe it’s really important to have measures of success and for that reason almost all aspects of the feedback report are measurable in terms of improvement.