How to evaluate the quality of your website

Here are some of the factors you need to consider when grading the quality of your site:

1. Usability

One of the most important factors you need to consider is the usability of your site. If visitors cannot access your site or find what they are looking for easily, they are likely to leave and go elsewhere. Here are some of the questions you need to ask yourself:

• Are all the links working?

• Is the navigation easy to understand?
• How long do your pages take to load?
• Is the site compatible with major browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox?
• Do you have a search button on your site?

• If you are collecting customer details, is their information secure?

2. Content

When it comes to evaluating content, you should first consider whether it is useful to your readers. Secondly, you need to check if it is readable. If visitors cannot read your content due to its pale color or small size, they will end up getting frustrated. Therefore, take time to check all the content on your site to ascertain if it communicates your message effectively. Besides choosing a large and readable font, make sure there is enough contrast between the font colors and background colors to enhance readability.

3. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation enhances the rankings of your site thus making it easy for people to find you online. When evaluating your site, you should first check if the heading tags, meta descriptions and title tags contain the relevant keywords. If you have some photos or graphics on your site, find out if they have ALT tags in their image descriptions. Image optimisation with ALT tags will enhance the ranking of your site. Finally, you should consider creating a sitemap if you don't already have one on your site.

4. Strategy

No matter how user-friendly or attractive your site is, it is useless if it does not accomplish the purpose for which it was created. Therefore, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• When visitors land on your site, do they immediately get an idea of what your business is all about?

• Do the website graphics, fonts and colors align with your brand?
• Does the overall design of the website appeal to your target audience?

• Does your website design or content clearly show visitors know what they need to do? For instance, you might want them to sign up for a newsletter or buy a product

Conclusion

Other important factors you need to consider during evaluation include social media integration, traffic, mobile friendliness, lead generation and blog integration. Improving on all these aspects will make it easier for you to achieve the objectives of your site.