When you own and operate a website, it is your responsibility to ensure that you deliver the best possible platform for your customers. To do so, there are several factors that you need to consider, and with the indications that you have indeed created a healthy website. Let’s take a look at some of them now.
Security
You need to make sure that you have provided a safe and secure website for your customers to browse. Everything starts from here. No matter what content you put on your website, you are not going to get people to stay on your site if it is not safe for them to do so.
There are several things that you can do to ensure that you do indeed have a healthy and secure website for them to be on. One of the most important will be to build the website in HTML5. If you have an existing website that you need to convert, make sure you do all pages including any pop-ups so that your entire site is safe and secure. These measures, together with a valid SSL certificate, should help you to create a secure website for your audience to explore.
Load Time
Your pages should load nice and quickly regardless of where they are on the site or what device you are accessing them from. If they don’t this is something that you need to fix as soon as you can. There will always be a reason as to why a page takes a while to load, and so you need to suss out what it might be.
For example, you might find that there is a buggy plug-in on one page that causes it to load incredibly slowly. There is a very easy fix here – all you need to do is ensure that the plug-in is removed and then find a new one that has the same functionality without the lag. Any images on the page could also be far too big, meaning that they will always load on the slower side. These are just some of the reasons why your site might be loading slowly, so do the necessary detective work to find out what is wrong.
Traffic
What is the traffic to your site like? If you want a healthy site, you need to make sure that you have plenty of people stopping by to see what you have to offer. The use of a website traffic checker can soon let you know just how popular your business is in an online search.
If your traffic is on the lower side, there are a few steps you can take to try to boost it. One of the easiest can come from your social media accounts. If you have a good following on there, you should think about some of the ways in which you can push this traffic from your social media pages through to your site. A well-timed post with a good CTA will be key here!
Engagement
What is engagement like on your site? When we talk about engagement, we can often mean in terms of likes and comments on social media. Unless you are pushing for something similar with blog posts on your site, engagement might take a slightly different form when connected to your website.
Are there pages that are more popular than others? Do they get more clicks and have a longer dwell time? If so, is there a reason why? It might be pretty obvious – like the page is the homepage or one of your most popular products – but it could also be something that you need to address. If you have products, are your customers leaving you good reviews? There is always some way that you can drum up a little engagement on your website so that your customers arrive there and are compelled to stay.
SEO
Search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is very important as it is what helps your website to rank well on search engines. The higher that it is ranked, the easier it is to find when searching for.
There are plenty of tips and tricks that you can use to improve your SEO. It is something that is always changing, so make sure that you do everything in your power to deliver the best results for your site. If you are struggling with what is required for this discipline, you can also consider bringing in an SEO expert. They can look through your pages and determine what needs to be done to bring it up to standard.
A healthy website needs to be something that everyone strives for when operating their own space online. There are several easy metrics you can turn to when trying to determine how healthy and sustainable your site is. Make sure that they are in place, and you will soon find yourself with a thriving website that will always attract interest from customers. You might already have the first indicators that you are on the way to a healthy website. It is now just up to you to determine the other factors that need to be in place to create a healthy site.