Website Checklists
HOW TO REVIEW YOUR WEBSITE THIS YEAR
At least once per year we should be looking at our website to make sure it pleases both the Google robots AND our people. Whether you are planning to launch your new website soon, or have been in business with a website up for a while – this guide will help.
WEBSITE & INTERNET STATISTICS
This has been a great year, and a lot has added up to make websites much more relevant in 2020 and beyond, here are some statistics from around the internet.
- There are 4.1 billion Internet users in the world as of January 2019.
- 3.8 billion of internet users are on mobile devices.
- Over 4 million blog posts are published on the Internet every day.
- Over 5 billion Google searches are made every day.
- It takes about 0.5 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website and whether they will stay or go.
- 70% of consumers admit to passing judgements on a company’s credibility based on the website design.
- 55% of internet users say they do not feel comfortable with a website if they do not have a good mobile website experience.
- In 2019 smartphones held over a 63% share of all retail website visits.
- 39% of people will stop using your website if the content is cheap or design is unattractive.
- 40% of people will go elsewhere a website's images won’t load or take too long to load
- 45% of Users expect a maximum of 2 seconds or less website loading time.
- Slow-loading websites cost retailers around $2.5 billion in lost sales year over year.
- 72% of small business websites are missing a Call to Action section on their homepage.
- 93% of first impressions are determined by design-related appearance.
- 86% of consumers who search for a local service on a mobile will call or go to that business within 24 hours.
Stats as of Q4 2019
Having an under-performing website makes you one of the many business owners with low traffic volume and low conversions. This guide is meant to get you back in or ahead of the game in 2020 and beyond.
YOUR WEBSITE CHECKLIST GUIDE
If you are thinking about self-examining your website this year, here are the top key factors to focus on. We recommend performing a self-audit or hiring a professional to review your website and it’s performance to help you formulate the best path for moving forward this year based on data collected from last year.
Google has released public documentation so that we know how they look at & rank websites.
Review the Google quality rating guidelines
GENERAL WEBSITE GUIDELINES
What new goals do you have this year, and how do those relate to your website?
This checklist primarily focuses on WordPress websites, but for the most part concepts & factors mentioned can apply to all website platforms.
That being said, this guide is basic with some good advanced & technical tips included and works for both new website launches and existing websites.
Are you up to date with your website?
Have any legal terms or policy changes happened within your company that need to be reflected on the website?
Do you have exclusive, even private sections of your website that are being accessed from another place allowing people to back-door your offers?
Is your website on a platform that you understand and can manage yourself?
Do you have guidelines and a strategy for your website?
GATHER LAST YEAR'S WEBSITE DATA
Make sure all of your tracking integrations are up and running while you are visualizing data collected from last year. This includes traffic data, user metrics, conversions and more so that you can correlate with your sales to know where you are having the most impact.
- Top performing pages (with the most clicks)
- Lowest performing pages
- Pages with high impressions but low clicks
- Keywords with the highest impressions
- Keyword variance based on something you did not intentionally target
- Look for spikes in traffic for seasonal significance
Check your incoming links, make sure they are mostly relevant to your business
Compare the incoming links presented in Google Search Console vs a link checking tool like ahrefs to compare to make sure you have insight to all links to your website (Google does not always show every single link)
Check both Google + Bing for any technical site errors such as:
- 404 broken links or deleted pages that were not redirected
- Website pages that should not be indexed by search engines, such as “Cart” or “My Account” pages
- Schema markup validation errors can prevent you from having rich snippet results displayed
- Website speed reports within GSC are now available, and website speed is more important than ever
Tools you need for this:
Website + Marketing Audit
Let’s find the holes in your performance boat before it sinks.
Check website functions & integrations
Subscription audit
Sometimes something in our website can be broken without us noticing. At least once per year get into your website and test the functions & other integrations to make sure everything still runs the way you set it up.
- Hosting account
- Domains account
Plugin Audit
Plugin makers, online software vendors, and etc can change their pricing models or terms of service at any time, so if you are not logging into your website often you may know even know something is not functioning.
- Page builders
- Added functionality plugins
Lead capture funnels
You could have a lead capture, opt-in, or simple contact form that is not working, and although people may contact you in a different way, what if there is not any notification of the error – business lost.
- Landing pages
- Redirection links
- Thank you pages
- Push lead info to CRM system
Contact forms
Email responder integrations
What if your email integration has stopped working or has been tagging your leads with the wrong segmentation? – that could turn away future business!
- Puts capture leads into email campaign to help win the sale, or generate repeat business
- Websites that use email marketing can enjoy 200% sales increases over competitors that do not
Automatic website updates
You may have WordPress core updates waiting to be applied, or there could be a problem with your hosting cron scheduler and auto updates are not being applied. Updates to websites and plugins are usually for security patches, so they are very important.
Plugins that added special features based on a subscription
If you have had a plugin that provided a specific feature to your website and forgot to pay the subscription, depending on what it was, can interrupt your entire website lead capture system, or worse.
Targeted Advertising Integrations
Part of a good marketing strategy that includes your website has to do with re-targeting the people who came to visit you but didn’t buy anything the first time. If you are running ads, in 2020 and beyond you will need to take advantage of lead capturing tactics and ad retargeting to catch the attention span of a goldfish.
Facebook Pixel tracking & Retargeting
Follow your potential customers where they spend the most time and attach the Facebook tracking pixel to your website so that you can show up in the Facebook feeds of people who visited your website.
Google Adwords Retargeting & Tagging
You can target the people who visited your website around the internet as they use Google and Google Partners in the display network. If they have clicked your Google ad, you can retarget them with other campaigns.
Check your website structure Overall
Website Sitemap
Usually a once-&-done but sometimes sitemap plugins can have problems. Review your website sitemap to find any pages included unintentionally, and make sure the most important pages are discoverable. (You can check for sitemap errors in both Google & Bing)
Content Silos
Do the supporting pages of your top level topics or categories fit in a logical hierarchy?
Layout & Design
Do the competitors look better than you? Does your website look outdated? This might be the year to redesign the website!
Navigation & User Experience (UX)
Are all of the most commonly used pages at the top of your menu, easy to click on for both returning and new website visitors? (High bounce rates can indicate people are not finding what they are looking for, or that the website turned them off in some way.)
Check your website on-page situation
Each page on your website has the potential to rank for many keywords & phrases. How well you are doing in the following areas of website on-page determines how effective that page will be out in the wild.
Basic SEO
Keyword Research
Using the data collected from years prior while drilling down into keywords related to the moment of transaction.
- Keywords that relate to information and resources should go into your blog article topics.
- Keywords that relate to your products, services should be for your top sales pages.
Page Titles
Still one of the top ranking factors so that bots know what the overall topic of your web page is about. You still need to include KWs in the page titles.
Content Headings
Part of structuring a well written document includes organizing your talking points into the H1, H2, H3, etc tags.
Similar or duplicated content
Do not allow 2 or more pages to compete for the same keywords
Internal linking
Links carry the most weight inside of the body of content on a page. Make sure your links to other important pages use exact match keywords or phrases linking from within the text of the body of content.
Advanced SEO
Schema markup specific to page type
About, contact, service, product and certain other pages all have schema markup terms specific to them, find what these are and make sure they output in JSON-LD format in the page header tag.
URL structures
URL deepest level should be no more than 3 and should be as short + descriptive as possible using regular words without numbers. (example, never use a date in a URL string)
Rel canonical link tag
Site-wide tag that tells other websites that the content on your page is the source of the original content and the content, thereby any credit thereof goes to that page. Make sure this is self-pointed to each page in your SEO settings site-wide.
Code output
Minify your CSS/JS/HTML
Have clean HTML & CSS files
Robots txt file
Google no longer supports the nofollow/noindex & disallow directives in the robots-txt file. Other web crawlers and bots do, which means that any post types, pages, posts, templates should be set to no-index, when appropriate, on the page level meta-robots tags and / or removed from the xml sitemap.
- Although robots txt may still work for bots other than Google, it is advised you move to the meta robots tag on the page level.
- You can still use robots file to effectively detour most of the bad bots & web scrapers out there.
Menu Links
Every main-menu and sub-menu should take advantage of the “Title Attribute” to make them more descriptive to include meta information for bots to consume and can provide more information to the user as to what the menu link is about.
Breadcrumbs structure
Website + Content Optimization
Make your website faster & stronger for better marketing and user experience.
Pages Layout & Content structure
Beautiful website pages help people trust your business. When they feel comfortable engaging with your website because the layout is organized and calm they will spend more time on it and appreciate you more because of it.
- Good content using keywords a few times
- Using type & fonts creatively
- Write as if you are talking to a friend
- Using images & videos
- Format pages that make it easy for people to scan-read, because that's what people do
- Proof read your old content & re-write if it sounds funny when you read it aloud
- Do not put a post into more than 1 category
- Do not put a post into more than 1 tag
Easy to read text
Is your text formatted into blocks that are short paragraphs and easy to read without having to traverse the entire width of the screen?
Breathing room between elements
Elements, buttons and other things should have at least a bit of padding between them, so if your content is looking crammed go in and put some white space between the items.
Sidebars
Does your sidebar have logical & relevant info, or does it have the junk you couldn’t find a better place to stick? If the content in your sidebar is junk, get rid of it.
Headers
The main bar that is usually the website main menu and can also contain “breadcrumbs”
Hero sections
The new trend these days either a half page or full-screen image with some catchy phrase written over top of it. Although they look cool, hero sections can be a stereotypical element that is no longer appreciated by most people – just get them to the content or CTA- FAST.
Cross-Browser testing
You may have a computer, tablet and a phone, but there are also different internet browsers out there. An iphone may render your website differently than an Android phone.
website content strategy
Website are more than just digital brochures, these things can be your marketing workhorse if you have the right strategy in place and maintain it.
Blog posts
Used to support your other main pages. These should provide value and information that links to your most important sales or capture pages.
Sales, Product & Service pages
Explains a service that you do or a product you offer, and the benefits therein. You need a single page for each of the single services or products you offer.
Offer Landing pages
Also called lead pages, the beginning of your website sales / conversion funnel. These are pages that help support or drive traffic from marketing campaign around the internet for a special offer.
Download pages
A point of conversion where you can capture lead info in exchange for something of value to them. These are pages that give your leads the information they wanted after submitting thier info to you.
- These pages can also act as a “Thank You” or “up-Sell / One Time Offers”.
Website Lead Capture
Capture more business than ever before with lead magnets & email followup.
website technical factors
A good website will load fast while being responsive to any device. To make sure all that works requires a little technical optimization.
Caching
Serving static pages to website visitors makes your website load very fast. If your website displays mostly pages with information that does not change often, then caching is a must.
Image compression
Images should always be formatted for web, or compressed in “jpg” or “png” file format before uploading to your website. However, if you have a website that’s been around a while, there are plugins and services that can compress the images you already have.
Security
- Firewall, Brute force protection
- Htaccess
- File permissions
- Bad neighborhoods on the internet
Server environment (website hosting)
While managed or shared hosting is beneficial in terms of cost, you get what you pay for. Website speed has a lot to do with who is hosting it, and how that server is configured. (We suggest cpanel hosting for WordPress)
GZIP Compression
Server side file compression, also called “GZIP” helps to smush your website files into smaller byte packets to be loaded faster.
PHP & MYSQL versions
As of PHP-7.0 websites can run faster and process more complicated functions, on each subsequent release of PHP make sure you are up to date.
Server security
Review security settings that your hosting panel has to offer and check for any updates.
Emailing account(s)
Has anyone recently left your company, or do you have old emails that need to be cleaned up?
SSL covering top level & sub-domains
Sometimes your SSL may not cover your mailing subdomains which can result in email delivery problems.
checklist for WordPress Websites
WordPress is running upwards of 90 million websites on the internet today. From part time enthusiasts to big brands WordPress is the website building platform of choice.
We see many WordPress installations overlooking some crucial settings, from design to speed, and from SEO performance to making the conversion there are certain ways you need to setup your WordPress website for it to be user friendly and have maximum effect.
General WordPress settings
WordPress is a great website building solution, but out of the box – some assembly & tools required.
- RSS output settings
- Comment settings
- Permalink settings
- Database cleanup
- Social sharing settings (OG data)
- SEO plugin settings (variable)
- Remove any plugins that are no longer actively in use
- Remove any plugins that have not been updated in over 1.5 years
Local Business Websites
Organic search (below the maps) is becoming harder with the increase of ads on the first page of big G. That is intentional. In 2020 and beyond it will be more of a mixture of a good website and paid ads.
- You still need areas-served directory silo for local relevance
- iframes of maps are working great
- All city, state, or regional pages need to have unique NAP and content
- Expect paid ads to overtake organic search soon
- Fake reviews, positive or negative, paid or solicited reviews are now illegal
E-Commerce & Online Shopping Websites
Online shopping is now subject to even more laws & regulations in 2020 and beyond from GDPR affecting overseas, to new rulings in California regarding consumer privacy.
- Amazon cracks down on fake reviews
- Amazon works hard to outrank it’s own sellers on Google
- Google shopping product carousel is taking up lots of real estate on the results page
Blogging & Influencer Websites
Google is looking for bloggers and influencers to be more transparent and credible and will begin checking the backgrounds and general sentiment around people & brands that will affect how they show up online.
- Google can now detect fake influencer marketing accounts
- Social media auto-following bots are now illegal
additional website tips you may consider
"If you are seeing a page with high impressions but low clicks it could mean a few things, but usually this means that either you are being shown low in the results, or that these are impressions from image searches with no clicks. This could also mean that you have a rich snippet showing in Google that is answering the query having no need to click to your page."
"If you notice a page with high impressions and clicks, but a very high bounce rate it could mean that the page is ranking for keyword terms that are unintentional or accidental."
"Google is using website visitor engagement & actions to help determine what is a good website. If your visitors are engaging highly with your website it will be seen more relevant than others with less action, and it will move up. (by website, we mean web-page)"
Website Action List
- Search for the brand name and branded terms to see what is showing up on pages 1 – 3 of Google & Bing.
- The primary keyword phrase of each page is contained in the H1 tag
- Images’ file names and alt text are optimized to include the primary keyword phrase associated with the page.
- Site contains real and substantial content
Is there real content on the site or is the “content” simply a list of links? - Proper keyword targeting
Does the intent behind the keyword match the intent of the landing page?
Are there pages targeting head terms, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords? - Keyword cannibalization
Do a “site:” search in Google for important keyword phrases.
Check for duplicate content/page titles, although Google could filter those out. - Content to help users convert exists and is easily accessible to users
- In addition to search engine driven content, there should be content to help educate users about the product or service.
- Check for 4xx errors and 5xx errors.
404 pages can be 301 redirected to the next best relevant page - XML sitemaps are listed in the robots.txt file
- XML sitemaps are submitted to Google/Bing Webmaster Tools, are they are not having problems accessing them.
- Check pages for meta robots noindex tag
- Are pages accidentally being tagged with the meta robots noindex command
Are there pages that should have the noindex command applied - Site architecture and internal linking
Keep your content silos tight and related while taking every opportunity to link terms that relate to other pages within your website. - Number of links on a page
100-200 is a good target, but not a rule. - Vertical linking structures are in place
- Homepage links to category pages.
Category pages link to sub-category and product pages as appropriate. - Product pages link to relevant category pages.
- Horizontal linking structures are in place
- Category pages link to other relevant category pages.
Product pages link to other relevant product pages. - Links are in content
Does not utilize massive blocks of links stuck in the content to do internal linking. - Footer links
Does not use a block of footer links instead of proper navigation.
Does not link to landing pages with optimized anchors. - Good internal anchor text
It is safe to use the exact match phrase or keyword within your own website when linking to another page. - Check for broken links
Although 404 errors may not effect your rankings, they can interrupt and affect the user experience or sales flow. - Check for errors in Google Webmaster Tools
Google WMT will give you a good list of technical problems that they are encountering on your site (such as: 4xx and 5xx errors, inaccessible pages in the XML sitemap, and soft 404s) - Check the following things on your website that should be hidden from Google or website visitors. The following pages should be set to: “No Indexed/ No Follow”.
- Thank You Pages
Usually no purpose, and if part of a sales funnel you don’t need this appearing in searches. - PDFs
This is what people are exchanging their info for, don’t let a PDF show up in search that someone is supposed to download from your website! You want to block unauthorized access to these using the .htaccess file. - Dates
Creates duplicated content from posts arranged in date archives, no value. - Authors
Same as the above for author archives. - Post Tags
Same as the above for tag archives - Product Tags
Same as the above - WP Directories
Do not block Google from accessing these directories so they can render your pages correctly, but they should not be indexed in their search results for others to find. Google usually does not index these directories by default. - Account Pages
Account pages are typically for existing customers or memebers, once they have been throguh your sales process, no need for someone to find this page in Google. - Using keywords throught your website code design such as within, CSS-IDs, Section Labels, and function calls can help increase your rankings.
FAQ people ask about improving their website
Start with a memorable domain name, then solid hosting plan, and a great content management system like WordPress.
You have to build SEO into your website.
Common sense, experience and using your brain are a good set of tools for auditing a website.
Beyond common sense we recommend using Ahrefs, Google Search Console and Screaming Frog web crawler with your own spreadsheet to visualize the data.
A comprehensive website checklist like the one on this page.
A good website checklist will cover the main categories and the most important factors within them and should include technical factors and details that pertain to your business niche.
A good website will have all the information that a customer is looking for designed in an organized layout.
Aside from the fundamentals, a good website will have ways of engaging visitors, and potentially capturing leads for your business.
All websites need the following basics:
- domain name
- hosting
- content management system
- Design strategy
- Content strategy
- A team or person to manage it
Beyond that, reference the checklist above for more details.
