A badly functioning, clunky website can really put customers off your business. It might only seem like a small thing, but consumers expectations are incredibly high these days. Most of your rivals will have a brilliant website, if you don’t then you’ll fall behind. A bad website is often the result of lots of small niggles and inconsistencies that can easily be ironed out. If you take a bit of time to check the site thoroughly before you put it up, you can avoid any embarrassment.
Here are the essential checks that you need to make before your site goes live.
Titles
The titles are one of the main aspects of good search engine optimization so it is vital that they are all correct. There’s no use having a great website if nobody visits it in the first place. It is also important for good navigation. A website that doesn’t navigate well will frustrate customers and give them a poor impression of your business.
Cross Browser Checks
There are a lot of web browsers available and if your site is a success, hopefully, it will be viewed on all of them. That’s why you need to make sure that your site runs flawlessly on all of them. They all run slightly differently so you’ll have to tweak things a bit. The same can be said for mobile websites. There’s nothing more annoying than trying to load a site on your phone and finding it all out of proportion and impossible to lose.
Check Links
The links are the primary way that users will get around your site. If they don’t work then nobody is going to stay for long. There are plenty of companies that have managed to transform test case management so you can use it to identify any discrepancies that there might be in the code. One of the most common mistakes is forgetting to include ‘https://’ at the beginning of all of the pages. It’s a quick fix and it would be a shame if your site didn’t work for such a silly reason.
As well as checking that they work, make sure they are obvious to users. You should also consider where the links go and how easy it is to get back to the homepage. Users won’t like having to click through ten links before they get to where they need to be.
Sitemap
Adding a sitemap to your website can really help the search engines to index your site. This will make it so much easier for potential customers to find your website in the first place. By mapping all of the pages on your site, it will include those in search results rather than just bringing up the homepage.
Animations and Pictures
Any pictures and animations on your site will be a big draw for users. They can capture people’s attention very effectively but if they aren’t working correctly, there will be huge white gaps on your site that will look rubbish. It will take a bit of time but going through every page to check it’s all there is the best way to do it.