STEP 10
Test Website Thoroughly Before Launching
Things to Do:
- Check all pages for broken links, and double check any emails or contact info.
- Ensure fast loading times and best practices
- Test on different browsers
- Test for page structure and SEO issues
Full Proof Your Website
You've already optimized your copy for SEO in Step 6 and hopefully caught any spelling and gramatical errors. You've also already optimized all your images for web and mobile and tested your site on various devices in Step 7. Right? If not, then step 10 may take a little longer. We are now getting to the nintty gritty and the final step before launching your beautiful new website.
Test Your Web Site Using Different Browsers
Test your site on different Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) to ensure everything appears as expected. The more issues you can find and fix now will make a difference in the way your site is indexed. The less issues equate to better performance and user experience which in turn will make your site easier to crawl which will help with higher search ranking. Employ the help of friends and family, ask them to review your site and try to break it. Litteraly. Click on everything that looks clickable. Ask them to keep note of any user interface issues, like broken links. Or maybe text that looks clickable but isn't. It's all about the details.
Test Your Site with Free Online Analytic Tools
Test your site using different online analytics tools to help you better understand how your site operates. Gain insights to underlying issues and tips on how to fix or improve them. Below are a few sites I use for testing and they are all free to use. Depending on your level of knowledge there will be some things you won't be able to fix or control. My primary goal is to get my websites to score high using Google's PageSpeed Insights. This tool will give you all the information you need to go about correcting any of Googles perceived issues.
About Google's Page Speed Insights
This test is a great place to start testing your overall sites performance and more importantly it is how Google evalutates your site. Just copy and paste your URL into the field and click go. Getting good scores accross the board is always the goal. If you've installed Google Site Kit it will help you discover any additional issues with your site as it builds up a data base.
There are many other testing websites besides Page Speed that run tests on SEO and Performance. There are paid for services that show analytics that dive deeper into the details that can help improve your websites rankings. However, if you can get good scores with Pagespeed Insights then be assured that Google will rank your site highter.
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
Performance
Performance is the first Score in the Page Speed Test. It's important that your score be above 70 which is the industry standard for a good performaning website. Most performance issues stem from third party plugins like Google Analytics or Youtube, oversized images, slow font loading or bad site structure. The fewer the plugins you use to magage your site the better.
Performance can be affected by a host of things including your hosting service infrastructure, image and asset optimization, Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve load times along with mobile optimization and website complexity. Your hosting company like GoJOEDaddy.com should include a CDN in your subscription.
NOTE:
There are some issues that can't be helped. There is always room for improvement but sometimes that comes at a cost. The trick is finding the right balance between what you want and what you need. For example trying to get a 100 score in Performace may require a much more simple design, including some funtioanlity changes. Consider what is important to your brand and your audiance to determine what sacrifices your willing to make for the sake of performance.
Accessibility
Accessibilty is a test that determines how accessible your site is to someone who may be impaired in way that requires some assistance in navigating your site. For example can they zoom in and out of the website. Are there Alt tags describing your images. Are the buttons and links easily clickable and is there enought contrast between text and backgrounds.
Most of times it's just a matter of adding an Alt tag to an image or adjusting a color for better contrast to get a score of 100.
Best Practices
Best practices has a lot to do with site structure. Optimized images, eliminating unused CSS/Javascript, mobile friendliness etc. If you followed the steps in this guide your score should be 100.
SEO
This test scores how well your SEO is recieved by Google. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to get a score of 100 especially if you installed and set up the Yoast Plugin. If you decided to go without using Yoast, you can still get a 100 by ensuring all your pages have Meta Descriptions.
Free Testing Sites
Below are some other sites I recommend for additional testing. Each provide a different set of results and help guide you towards fixing and improving your overall websites performance and SEO.
seobility
The SEO Checker analyzes your website and gives you tips on optimizing your site for a long-term success in search engine optimization!
Pingdom
Enter a URL to test the page load time, analyze it, and find bottlenecks. The test identifies if a webpage is fast, slow, too big, etc.
Yellow Lab Tools
Open source tool allows you to test a webpage (via any URL) and detects performance and front-end code quality issues.
Have Questions?
Please contact me directly.
Free Consulting is just a phone call away.
904-501-9526
Ask for JOE
STEP 11
Launch and Maintain