A successful website requires constant oversight. It’s important that your site is checked regularly to ensure that it is performing optimally. If you just ‘let your site go’, then it’s likely that the site will come undone over time. A regular ‘health check’ – preferably weekly - will keep your site on track.
Here are some of the things that you should be doing on a regular basis – schedule it into your diary!
- Check for broken links
- Check for redundant or out of date information
- Check your competition – what are they up to?
- Check for site errors via your statistics package and rectify
- Check, record and analyse your site statistics – unique visitors, repeat visitors, page views, page views per session, time on the site, most popular pages, etc.
- Check for web accessibility and standards - does it meet Web Accessibility Initiative and W3C guidelines?
- Check your search engine listings – where do you appear in the search engine results pages? Has there been an improvement over time?
- Check that all pages have correct metadata tags
- Check that you have an XML sitemap and that the information is being sent to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer
- Check your site navigation to ensure that it is logical
- Check any search engine marketing programs (eg Google Adwords) that you are running to make sure that you are getting a good return on investment
