Your website will never be completely finished

Continuous development of the website

A fine example (without comparison) is the Golden Gate Bridge, the iconic bridge that connects San Francisco with Marin County. In 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was opened. Among some of the maintenance that is done is painting. The bridge is constantly painted to prevent the high salt content in the air from causing the steel to rust. A job they'll never finish.

This is exactly the case with your website as well. It must be maintained so as not to rust.

Your website is the first opportunity your company has to engage with potential customers. It's that place, that chance you have to convince that what your company delivers is worth trying. Do you want to play down the opportunities your website provides by letting it slowly but surely rot on clutter?

You need to see that your visitors have the desired behavior on your website. Do they visit the most important pages, read those articles and do they do what you want them to do? These are insights you should be in control of at all times.

First of all, your website must have one or more clear goals!

If your company has clear goals and measurement parameters for the website, you can skip to the next section — What content is most popular

Hopefully the website has some clear goals that it is working towards. These relate to your core business and should contribute to better bottom line results.

Review these goals and make sure they are relevant today. Has anything changed in the company? Does the website have new products/services or features that were not included in the original plans for the site?

Once the goals are in place, you can start with a review of the website.

Don't have goals for the website?

If your company does not have clear goals for the website, then this must be in place. How are you going to be able to assess and measure success if goals are not set? Which measurement parameter should you then steer by?

Before you define the goals of the website, you need to define who the website is for. Here it is easy to include yourself and the employees as the target audience. Although it is difficult, it is important to keep personal opinions and desires to yourselves. Everyone in the company has some thoughts about what would turn out well, which very quickly ends with long discussions that hinder progress. Here one will benefit from involving external professionals who view the website from the user's perspective.

Once the target groups are in place, you can define what are the important actions that visitors should take on the website.

What conversions are most important to your site?

It can be one or more of these:

• purchase of product/service
• Subscribe to Newsletter
• read articles
• filling in contact form
• Appointment Booking
• send email

Reading articles, watching a video or a few seconds inside a specific page can be other conversions that are important for your website. Once the goals are in place, it's good to get an overview of the following:

What content is most popular?

Which landing pages get the most visits? What landing pages do visitors spend the most time on?

If the company spends money or time on the production of content, it is important that you have control over what is actually read. It shows what visitors like, what content the website may lack or does not have enough visibility on.

Sources of success

The sources from which the visitors come (Google, Facebook, newspaper advertisement, etc.) help to provide a picture or explanation of the (missing desired) behavior.

Examples of questions you can ask yourself are:

• Which channels generate the most traffic?
• Which channels bring the most conversions?
• Which channels give the most time on the page?

The questions you ask yourself here depend on your goals for the website.

Traffic from Google and search engines

Does the website have a good share of traffic from search engines or little?

Most sites today get most of their traffic from Google (organically). Search engine optimization is a simple but effective measure to increase the percentage of correct visits to the website. This is not difficult or very complicated, but at the same time both time and expertise are required to achieve good results.

Check which pages your visitors go to from Google. How does the content match up to what the user has searched for? Is there anything that can be adjusted in the texts to hit the applicant even better?

When Google is constantly making changes to its algorithm to improve search results, it is important to make the small necessary adjustments to maintain good rankings in searches and be visible on relevant keywords.

Find the right keywords for the topics you're writing about

Look at what users are actually googling around that topic you're talking about so you get both the right word usage and content that the user is searching for. For example: do most people seek sneakers or running shoes? Using tools such as Google Ads (free tool but you must have an active account), Semrush (paid) or Ahrefs (paid) you can find statistics on searches per month. Another trick if one does not have access to such tools is simply to Google the topic you are going to write about and see what keyword suggestions pop up, questions and answers in the search result, and others searched for as well. Here you do not get concrete statistics on what is most searched, but it gives an indication of what users are interested in.

When you have an overview of what people are searching for in Google, you can also ensure that your most important landing pages are optimized with the most important (and correct) keywords. Read more about search engine optimization here.

Traffic on the website

Increasing the number of visitors is always desirable. Compare with the previous period and the same period of previous years. You want to see increased traffic over time.

Tip: Be sure to mark in the analysis tool if something special is happening. For example, enough Covid-19 had an impact on the visit to the websites for many, either positively or negatively. It is easy to remember, but there may be other minor, yet important events that affect traffic to the website. It is good for the future to know what actually happened at a time when one sees greater changes in the number of visitors.

Returning visits

If people come back to your website, then they found something they liked there, whether it was some form of content or products.

Will they never come back? Can you get them to come back more often?

Scroll depth

Important articles/content pages should track scroll depth. By tracking this you can see who has read 25%, 50% or 100% of the article.

Such information can help to understand whether one is writing too long, too boring or irrelevant to the target audience. Headlines that don't match the content can be devastating. Seeing how far your visitors actually read gives a good clue as to whether your content is actually being read.

Some visitors to your website will only look at the page they entered and then disappear back out. This is recorded as bounce rate/escape frequency.

A page with a high bounce rate indicates that visitors cannot find what they are looking for and/or do not want to enter the page for one or more reasons.

It's scary just looking at the escape frequency alone. If you have good articles that give your visitors what they are looking for, they can have a successful visit to your page, even if they “flee”. They simply found what they were looking for.

With scroll depth tracking, you can by looking at these numbers along with average time spent on the page, see if your visitors liked your content.

Loading time

Long loading time of a website is very effective if you want to chase away visitors. Make sure you have a quick page and you can easily check it for free with Google's PageSpeed Insight.

Good navigation is important for the user experience

Is it easy to navigate your way through the page without having to go to the front page or menu every time? Is that a sensible and good internlinking?

A good navigation also implies a good and clear structure of the website. How should the content be categorized, and should one show all the categories or only the main categories? Here, a UX designer should work in conjunction with an SEO advisor to design a good menu structure that makes it easy for the user to understand where to go.

Make sure your visitors don't have to think. Make navigation intuitive — here it can be natural to do a user test to uncover any misunderstandings.

Broken Links

No matter how you get to a page that no longer exists it's frustrating. Check that all pages on the website are up and running. In addition, check that you have a good 404 page. A good 404 page gives the visitor good options for further navigation, some selected links, internal search and main menu are things that can well fit.

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Many people use only an image or create something “arti`” on their 404 page. Humor is humor, but someone who does not find what he or she is looking for will probably appreciate some good tips for the way forward.

Design makes the first impression

Good design highlights function while allowing it to separate the clink from the wheat. Feel free to consider whether the website needs a little refresher on the design, but do not overdo the changes, here small adjustments can make a big difference.

If you are not a professional yourself, we recommend that professionals take care of this. It is your target audience that should like and use your website, not you or your employees.

So when you're first going to see if your website is performing, don't get hung up on the look first. Many people often visit their own website for various reasons. The consequence is that they get tired of seeing the same front page weekly, and often feel a need to make changes to the design. With an external glance, one will gain an advantage by seeing the solution from the eyes of users.

The website can always be better!

Frictions and bottlenecks will always exist. You can never create the perfect website, but you can always make your website better.

Working with a website is about trying to please as many visitors as possible so that they do what you want. Given that there is no clear facet of how a website should be, it means that you have to make the necessary adjustments to ensure that it is rigged as best as possible, at all times. In other words, it is an eternal process.

This is not a complete list of what to check on your website, but hopefully it inspires action.