How to Tell Whether Your Website Is Healthy

Sep 6, 2022 | 0 comments

Reading Time: 2 minutes
How to Tell Whether Your Website Is Healthy

The health of your website can play a major role in the amount of traffic your site gets and keeps. A website that takes too long to load may get visitors for a time, but slow loading tends to result in users clicking away in frustration. This, in turn, can cause rankings to decrease, which would then also mean a decrease in traffic.

But what can you do to check that your website is healthy?

Test Your Page Load Speed

It’s a good idea to regularly check that pages load quickly enough. There are free tools available that you can use, such as Google’s own PageSpeed Insights. There are other free tools for measuring page speed, but using Google’s may be best if you’re looking to improve your rankings on Google’s SERPs. This way, you can see how Google itself is measuring the speed of your webpage.

Tip: Check your page speed once a month at minimum or after any significant changes to the page. You’re looking for a load speed of fewer than 2 seconds.

 

Check for Broken Links

Links are an excellent way to demonstrate your trustworthiness (see EAT in SEO) but it’s important to keep them up-to-date. Sometimes, however, web pages you’ve linked to may be removed or may have their URLs updated. Google regularly crawls web pages and if it finds broken links, then that could negatively impact your rankings. Fortunately, you don’t have to manually go through every page to look for broken links. You can use free tools like dead link checker and Broken Link Checker to analyze your entire website for broken links.

Tip: How often you should check for broken links depends on the size of your website. Smaller sites may only need to check once every few months while larger sites should probably check closer to weekly.

 

Ensure Your Site’s Mobile-Friendliness

Google has indexed websites on a mobile-first basis for years now. This means that the mobile-friendliness of your site has a huge impact on your search rankings. Google made the switch in the first place because about 70% of people making a Google search are doing so on a mobile device. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly tend to end up with much lower rankings than those that are. You can check the mobile-friendliness for free using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Tip: Check your site’s mobile-friendless after any significant changes or additions.

 

Gain Insights from Google Analytics

Google provides many free tools that you can use to determine the overall health of your website and how well it’s performing. Google Analytics is another such tool. This one lets you know certain statistics about your website, from traffic data to website speed. On top of that, you can determine which pages are your best-performing ones and use that information to create more content like that.

Tip: Unless you’re an experienced web developer or SEO marketer, you may want assistance from an SEO specialist in interpreting the insights from Google Analytics.

 

Need help in improving your presence on search engines?

Get in Touch with BrainVine!
Share This