When running a small business, you need to consider how your website is working for you. Many customers and clients will typically prefer to visit a website before they visit a business, in order to find out its location and hours of operation or to get an idea for how professional the company is overall. Some business owners don’t realize that a website should be maintained regularly, meaning tested and reviewed. Consider a quick website maintenance checklist that any small business owner should keep in mind for their website.
1. Checkout Process
If you sell anything on your website, you need to ensure the checkout process works and note if customers seem to abandon their carts before actually purchasing. In some cases, your checkout process might insist on an email from customers or their phone number, and if customers don’t want to share this, they may go elsewhere to purchase. Your website may also have problems interfacing with your payment option programs, such as PayPal or a similar electronic wallet program. Every month you should check the number of visitors that abandon their purchase versus actually checking out, and also go through every option of purchasing to ensure the entire process works as it should.
2. Broken Links
Nothing makes a website look more amateurish and unprofessional than broken links. This can mean outbound links to other sites, or links to pages on your site that no longer work for whatever reason. Customers and visitors can get frustrated with broken links and click away from your site quickly, so be sure you check all the links every month. Remove links to pages that have expired and walk yourself through your entire website, page by page, to ensure all those links are working properly.
3. Stats and Traffic
The stats you can get about your website can be very useful. For example, you might note that customers linger on your blog but don’t buy your product. You then may realize that you need to emphasise the value of the product you sell in your blog. You might also note that you get many visitors to your front page, but they click away very quickly. This tells you that your website doesn’t appeal to visitors and may need better organisation or a better appearance. Every month you should ensure that your site’s traffic and stats functions are working properly and then review them so you know what other changes and updates you may need for your web pages.
Contact a local website maintenance professional, such as MBJ IntegratedTechnologies, for more information.
