How do I test my website after it’s been launched?
So you’ve just launched your new business website! Hurrah!! So you can drop the mic and walk away now, right? Not quite. Now that your website is live, browsers like Google are going to be ‘crawling’ your website, sussing out the different pages, how they link together and so much more. Basically, judging lots of different aspects of your website harshly. Once you’ve been well and truly judged, you’ll be given a ranking. This is your search engine ranking. (It’s a wee bit more complicated than that, but let's not waffle on about technicalities).
There are tests you can do to make sure your website hasn’t got some serious boo boo’s before Google comes along and crawls and indexes your website. (This process could take hours, weeks, or months).
Below, I am going to walk you through how to test four different aspects of your website before and/or after you have launched it into the big bad world.
1 - Mobile responsivity
2 - Page loading speeds
3 - On-page SEO issues
4 - Broken Links
1 - Mobile responsivity
OK, so this one's a big deal. All in all, most people carry out their internet searches via their mobile devices these days. Browsers like Google know this, and will judge how well your website performs on a mobile, this will include design, performance (ie - page speeds), and usuability (ie - can we even read that tinnyyy text that was supposed to look editorial but is simply illegible). Designing your website for mobile phones is now more important than ever.
What is the best way to test whether my website has a mobile-responsive web design? There are great website out there to help you out..
Experte - Experte allows you to bulk test your pages, see if all your web pages (and sub pages!) are mobile friendly in one go. Saving a ton of time if you are testing large websites.
If you’ve been told you have some mobile usability issues, you’ll need to go back to your web design and make the necessary changes.
A few errors you may come across:
The text is difficult to read.
Clickable elements are too close together.
Content wider than the screen.
Sometimes it’s not completely clear to what elements they are referring. Do your best to work it out, and if you still feel it is not resolved, hire a web developer to make sure your website is fully mobile responsive.
OK, Sophie, I’ve resolved my mobile usability issues. What next?
Browsers crawl your website on a regular basis, so you have the option of sitting back and waiting for your website to be crawled again. If you have actually resolved the issues, your website will come back clean as a whistle on the next judgement.
Say you want to speed this process up and submit a ticket to say, "Hey look, I’ve sorted out the issues.” Can you please let me know we’re all good now’.. it’s time to get set up on Google Search Console. On your Google Search Console account, you can do all sorts of fabulous things, and one of them is check for errors, fix them, and validate them. Also, don’t worry about having to check your website again every time you make a design change.
Now that you’re set up with Google Search Console, you’ll get an automatic email letting you know if there are any mobile usability issues every time your website gets crawled.
2 - Page loading speed
After you have launched your website, you may find you have forgotten to compress some of your images, or delete unnecessary scripts or libraries (or even worse, your web developer might’ve). Testing your page loading speed is a great way to make sure you have optimised every part of your website in the development phase to ensure your users aren’t waiting around to see your fantastic content.
Also, people are pretty impatient these days. Browsers know this (hint: they know everything), and, you guessed it, they judge you harshly on how quickly your pages load.
How can you test and improve your page loading speed?
Now, don’t get too caught up on every negative result you are shown when you test your page load speeds. There are aspects you just can’t control, especially when you use a web builder. Keep an eye out for images that are above 500 kB.
3 - Check for on-page SEO errors
SEO errors can be anything from having the wrong heading structure, images not having ALT descriptions, or missing meta information. It's the full monty audit, testing all the areas you are going to be judged on by browsers. It’s important to make sure your on-site SEO is as healthy and optimised as possible when you launch. It can take a while to build up a positive SEO rank, so start off on a good footing and make sure you resolve as many SEO errors as you can.
If you hired a web designer or developer, hopefully you hired a professional that included on-site SEO within their offerings. Therefore, your website should be in a pretty healthy state from the get go. However, we have human eyes and brains, which are far less superior than the eyes of trained software. That’s why the first thing I do after launching a client's website is to run these important tests to make sure I can polish off any smudges I might’ve missed.
What do I do when I get faced with a list of SEO errors?
You’ve got two options:
DIY. Learn about what each error means through research and free tutorials, and delve into the design and back-end of your website to make the necessary changes. Most SEO checkers provide small explanations of what the errors are and how to fix them, but I would recommend digging deeper to truly understand the what and why of what you’re doing.
Hire a professional. Either a web developer or an SEO strategist, they most probably use their own professional SEO software and can isolate all your errors and improve, if not fix, the majority of them.
Where can I test for on-page SEO errors?
A quick, basic free option is
https://www.seobility.net/en/seocheck/
A robust in-depth paid option
https://app.neilpatel.com/en/ubersuggest/
NOTE: Ubersuggest is the most impressive SEO tool I’ve used. It’s equally as user-friendly and detailed as other options like SEMrush but costs considerably less and offers a "one-time fee, lifetime access" plan. Unlike their bigger competitors, which ask for a hefty monthly membership fee, resulting in you paying thousands in the long run, Web developers, if you’re looking for a good SEO tool to run your clients' sites through so you can offer a professional and effective SEO service, ubersuggest is the one for you. Check it out for free, and let me know what you think.
Keep in mind that you’re never going to get them all. Certain aspects of "good SEO" only blossom once you have been online for some time and built authority through blogging or getting your website featured on other websites. Just do what you can, and create a strategy for how you are going to continuously work on improving your overall SEO ranking.
A few examples of what would be on your list:
Promoting your website regularly on social accounts.
Publishing engaging and educational content regularly.
Building authority through backlinks.
4 - Broken Links
When you test your website for SEO errors, broken links should come up as a big error, so you may find you’ve already tackled this area of your website's health. Nevertheless, I’m a belt and braces kind of gal, so I will always test for broken links on a separate site.
Why, you ask?
I'm glad you did. Broken links are a serious issue. It basically means you have a link on your website that has the wrong address and doesn’t really exist. So when your user clicks on it, they will most likely get faced with a 404 error telling them that the page doesn’t exist.
Why do browsers take this so goddamn seriously?
Well, the internet is essentially a web of links. Think of it like a series of motorways taking you from one website to another website (external links) and lots of little country roads providing a route for your users to work their way around your website (internal links). Say one of those links is broken; that's essentially a dead end. Browsers like Google aren’t going to be impressed with the fact that you are building roads that lead to nowhere, and low and behold, that is going to give you a negative mark on your star chart, thus giving you less visibility to those all important internet users.
How can I test whether my website has broken links?
There are a tonne of websites online that will scan your website for free and let you know if any of the links are broken. Here’s the top one that pops up on Google that I used yesterday to check for broken links for free:
https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
I'm glad I did! I found that there was an internal link in one of my blog posts (that was meant to point to a different blog post) that was broken. I realised I had changed that specific blog post URL and had not gone through my website to update all the instances in which I had quoted the original URL. Rooky mistake really, but hey, we’re all human, that’s why we run the tests.
