Many website owners genuinely don't know if their website has been well made. One of the first things I do is to test their website pages using the tools that I am going to share with you below. They are fun, easy to use and extremely helpful - so please use them too to get a good idea how well your website is doing.
IS YOUR WEBSITE ERROR FREE?
Input any webpage url and the W3C Markup validation service will point out the HTML, CSS or XML coding errors.
Why fix coding errors? At time of writing, Google.com throws up 23 HTML validation errors. Furthermore HTML errors are usually invisible to the end user - I have seen webpages that throw up hundreds of HTML errors without having any noticeable affect when browsing the webpage. So why bother? Apart from demonstrating a healthy website, having a page free of errors makes for a more stable website that is easier to maintain and easier to upgrade.
HOW FAST IS YOUR WEBSITE
Google Pagespeed tool is simple enough to use and understand. Plug in your url and Google will calculate the speed with which your page loads on both mobile devices and PC - even going as far as highlighting where you can speedup your page loading times. Implementing the changes can be tricky and you will require a web designer with knowledge of htaccess, servers and xml. As an estimate, anything over 80/100 is a good Pagespeed. Under 50 and you have problems to resolve.
The importance of Page speed? Simply put - if your page is slow, visitors will go elsewhere.
WEBPAGE KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION
Each webpage should be optimized for 1 keyword or keyphrase. Over-simplifying the on-page optimization process slightly, you should check that the the keyphrase appears in the page url, the browser page title, the on-page title and within the page.
Why optimise a website? On-page optimization is about clearly communicating to search engines what your page is about. It helps search engines to index your webpages correctly and plays key apart in driving visitors to your website.
IS YOUR WEBSITE MOBILE READY?
Does your website have a responsive design or a mobile website? Use Google's mobile friendly tool to test if your site is deemed suitable for mobile users.
Why is responsive so important? Mobile traffic accounts for around 30% of internet usage and rising. If your website is not mobile ready then you are missing out on a large proportion of your market. Furthermore, Google sees time spent on a website an increasingly important indicator to the true value of a website. If mobile users reach your website and immediately leave, this will be taken as a clear signal by Google to stop sending mobile traffic to your site.
BACKLINKS
Input any webpage url into Alexa to find an estimate of the number of backlinks to the site. With varying degree of accuracy, Alexa will also rate your website on a host of other other metrics including country rank and website traffic.
Why backlinks are important? As a rule of thumb, the more links pointing to a website, the more importance search engines will give to that website, and the more traffic it is likely to receive due to people clicking the links to visit the website. There are large variations in the perceived weight attached to each link. Links from larger sites, and from industry leading websites are viewed as far more important by search engines than links from small sites that are irrelevant to your own industry/ sector.
WEBSITE AND SERVER PERFORMANCE
Pingdom is a paid service (with free trials) that monitors your website downtime (how often it is off-line due to server problems/maintenance) and server speed. Many hosting companies accept the server speed data as an unbiased industry standard - I have used it on occasions to request free server upgrades. Like the many of the other tools in this post, Pingdom is easy to use and intuitive - sign up for a free trial, plug in your homepage url and enjoy.
Why downtime is important? Do you really know when, how often and for how long your site disappears? If you are Europe-based but targeting the US, the last thing you want is a server that goes down for maintenance each night whilst you are asleep but your US clients are trying to logon.
Server downtime and server response time vary from one hosting company to another and even within hosting companies. If your website is slow, often the main cause is server response time. Requesting an upgrade to a better server may well solve your problem.