Have You Given Your Website a Health Check?

There’s no doubt about it, building a website takes time and money. But your business doesn’t stop at go-live and neither should your website investment. As the digital face of your brand, your eCommerce store is the main asset your customers interact with and you need to continuously get the most value from it – long after launch.

Your website is online 24/7 and visitors expect it to consistently work well. As a result, it’s normal and expected that over time they need a clear out, a health check and optimisation. Without ongoing maintenance, your once brand-new, shiny store can become outdated, slow, costly and potentially unsecure. Plus, with UK eCommerce sales increasing by 48 percent in July and an uncertain yet highly anticipated peak period on the horizon, it’s even more important to get your website in shipshape.

Why does your website need a Health Check?

Your eCommerce store is made up of many different cogs which, when working together, create a finely tuned, fully functioning website. These different cogs such as site speed and performance, upgrades, coding, integrations, content and SEO need to be reviewed on a regular basis. If you leave one element to (metaphorically) rust, it can quickly start to wear your website down, ruining the user experience and will ultimately become more time-consuming and costly to fix. Additionally, when you spend time maintaining your own website, it can often take a fresh pair of eyes to take a look and spot what needs tidying up.

It doesn’t matter whether your website is only a few months or five years old, a regular health check is a must to ensure you’re still offering a positive online experience to your customers. Conducting a yearly review can provide insights that otherwise could be easily overlooked. These insights can be fed into ongoing site improvements, making it as easy as possible for your customers to shop with you.

What’s the value?  

You might think that giving your website a Health Check just sounds like an additional cost, but in reality, it can save you significant money in the long run. Other than checking your website health is high and ensuring the longest lifespan possible, taking the time to give your site a Health Check also has a number of other benefits:

  • Keeps your site secure: Security is a big concern for all eCommerce websites, especially for those still operating on Magento 1. Taking this approach, you can keep your users and your website safe. Ensure every element of your eCommerce store is up to date by protecting your environment from cyber-attacks, fraudulent activity and ensuring you are PCI compliant. A provider such as Sansec can also be used as a quick win to securing your Magento store if it is under attack.
  • Saves you money: An iterative approach to website maintenance can prolong the lifespan of your eCommerce store. Regular, dedicated time spent on your site allows issues to be recognised and resolved faster, delaying that rebuild for as long as possible.
  • Ensures consistent top performance: A regular Health Check ensures your site is always performing at it’s best and that no issues are left unseen for too long. Working alongside an agency on an ongoing basis, these tech-savvy individuals will know the ins and outs of your site to spot any performance troubles as and when they arrive.   

What can you expect from our Website Health Check service?

Mandatory site and code audit   

Even if your site first launched with no apparent hiccups it’s still possible for issues to rear their ugly head further down the line. To get right down to the nitty gritty, we conduct a site and code audit before all else – this is particularly important when taking on a website from another agency for us to understand exactly how your site has been built.

We offer a helping hand through technical consultancy, code profiling and performance optimisation to assess your site’s functionality and identify where changes need to be made. This process is undertaken by one of our experienced developers and allows us to identify:

  • Site performance issues
  • Security concerns
  • Opportunities for future development
  • Threats that could prevent future development

From this audit, we’re able to create a detailed roadmap of planned work featuring a priority order for those quick website wins. 

Front-end code audit

Websites are being built to deliver fast loading times, with single page applications and progressive web applications making online experiences more connected and seamless. As both customer expectations and technologies continue to evolve, it’s likely that even newer sites will have areas that can be improved.

To ensure your website keeps up with these growing expectations, we recommend a front-end code to assess the quality of existing code, best practices, security and site performance. By delving deep into the code, your eCommerce agency will be able to suss out what is helping or hindering your store.

Low level site performance

There could be a reason why you’re seeing a decrease in engagement and conversions or an increase in bounce rates. Site performance plays a huge role in creating a positive online experience for your users that spurs them on to continue shopping with you.

Issues with site performance could be due to a whole host of factors including page speed, unresponsive buttons, broken links, hard to navigate pages, rendering problems, large image sizes, small text or inaccessible content. If your site performance is lacking, you’ll have a low level of usability. These issues can create small delays which cause users to bounce or can even make your site completely unresponsive and unusable to your audience, quickly impacting your conversions.

Using an experienced agency to assess your site’s performance will ensure your users can interact with your site with ease.

Is your site responsive?  

This may sound obvious, but is every element of your site responding the way you designed it to, no matter the device? Your website needs to do more than just look good; it needs to perform too. More than just the visual elements, the best websites consider the user experience and user interface as one.

Every single device your website is viewed on can display elements differently including text, button sizes and onsite motions. These differences can affect a user’s browsing experience and cause them to exit your site. For example, if buttons are too small to press without accidentally tapping something else, it can cause issues with navigation and frustration for users. If the text is too small, it will be difficult to read. If the colour or font is hard to read, people won’t make the effort to understand it.

Our site responsiveness audit considers these factors. Through our research and analysis, we consider the most common device users access your site on alongside UX requirements. We can then create a more accurate picture of how customers interact with your eCommerce store and where usability issues crop up, taking this insight and using it to improve UX and encourage conversions. It’s important that your onsite content is always presented to your users in a way that doesn’t disrupt or ruin their browsing experience, creating a consistent UX for every single viewer.

Audit of your Google Analytics account 

Google Analytics is your gateway to understand how your website is being interacted with. Covering traffic sources, bounce rates and your most engaging pages, you can access reports for many important metrics linked to your site performance, therefore it’s a must that the data being tracked is accurate.

Auditing your Google Analytics account, we consider:

  • Issues within your account setup
  • How these issues can be resolved
  • Misattribution of traffic, goals, conversions and revenue

This audit can reveal issues that you had no idea existed, setting you up for better reporting in the future and creating a list of recommendations that need to be implemented onsite to improve the tracked metrics.

Content audit

It’s well known content is King. Although content is essential to communicate directly with your users, it can quickly become outdated. Analysing your onsite content, we can find answers to:

  • Where your high bounce rates are
  • Which pages require improvement
  • Where outdated links and statistics are used
  • What your content gaps are

Insight from this audit can uncover what it is about your business, products or services your audience is genuinely interested in. Feeding this into wider areas of your business, a roadmap of recommendations can be created to ensure your onsite content is relevant, informative and performs against your competitors.

User experience audit

If your user’s online experience is a little shabby, your online performance will be impacted. Pain points sometimes won’t be spotted until your site has been developed and being used by real customers which is why user testing and iterative improvements are so important.

A UX audit analyses the current state of your site, identifying why conversions on a particular page are low, how site usability can be improved, why bounce rates are high or any performance issues you’re experiencing. As a web development and design agency, our UI concepts are created with the UX journey in mind ensuring each element considers both. By looking at your user goals, traffic and engagement, conversions, usability and UX, we can design a shopping journey that has your customers in mind for each and every click.

How can Team Pinpoint help you?

You want to be confident that you can rest easy in the hands of your agency. That’s why our support doesn’t stop when your Magento website has launched. Dedicated to supporting you with timebanks and retainer packages designed to suit your business needs, you can rely on team Pinpoint to be proactive, flexible and committed.

Giving your website a Health Check will create a list of changes in order of priority to ensure your website continues performing for you and your customers. Ticking these off one by one as part of your ongoing Magento retainer plan is a sure fire way to ensure you always have a secure and stable website. Whatever your pain points – whether it’s hosting and support, extensions, patch installations, design and UX, strategy guidance, security updates – you can tap into our knowledge of Magento.

We have many longstanding clients who successfully use this approach to keep their eCommerce stores in peak condition. If you want to find out more about how Team Pinpoint operates and how we can support your needs, don’t hesitate to get in touch!