Are you looking for ways to boost your website performance? If so, you’ve come to the right place! In this blog post, we will discuss 15 website grader checks that you can use to improve your site. These checks are simple and easy to implement, and they can make a big difference in the overall usability of your website. Let’s get started!
Most of us were schooled in this lesson at some point: grades aren’t everything. However, a report card may be an advantageous tool for assessing what you do well and where you can improve. It was true in calculus and history courses long ago, and it’s still true today — at least, as far as your company’s website is concerned.
So, what factors influence how well a website performs, and what elements might stifle its performance? Performance is the sum of several things that influence whether and where your website appears in search results and user experience.
There are a few key elements that have a significant effect on the quality of your company’s website. These important aspects may be divided into four categories, each of which is evaluated by our free website grader tool:
- Website speed
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Mobile-friendliness
- Website security
We’ll look at each of these four fundamental areas in detail and assist you in resolving concerns of quality that impact each one.
You can check your website using this free tool we offer, powered by HubSpot’s Website GraderⓇ. Use the report as a foundation as you begin implementing performance improvements.
—-
1. Check Your Website’s Page Speed Performance
A few important elements can have a significant influence on the speed of your website’s load time and response time. Speed matters because users have grown used to fast loading and response. Our website grader performs and reports on the following checks:
- Page size. The smaller the page, the quicker it loads. Set a budget for each page and try to keep the total under 3MB. Remove large payloads like video whenever feasible since they have a significant influence on overall size.
- Page requests. While your websites load, images, fonts, and data tracking scripts affect the number of network requests and amount of data transmitted. Help speed up loading by removing anything unnecessary.
- Browser caching. Do you use browser caching on your site? Rather than having to download the same files each time someone visits your page, caching saves them in the user’s local memory. If your site does not utilize it, talk to a developer about implementing it or use a hosting service like HubSpot that automatically takes advantage of caching.
- Page redirects. Redirects are a reality of the internet. URLs may change over time, and you don’t want your website visitors to wind up on a 404 page! However, you may build up redirect chains where the initial URL directs to another, then another, and eventually to the page. The website grader can identify and report these redirect pileups, so you may clean them up.
- Minify JavaScript and CSS. Minification means taking out needless spaces and simplifying variable names. Minification makes your files more difficult to read, but computers aren’t affected, so it’s not an issue. After you finish writing CSS and JavaScript files, have them minified by your website hosting service if desired.
2. Check Your Website’s SEO
You already know SEO is vital to make yourself easy to find by people searching for terms relevant to your business. Since they’re using search engines to discover your content, your responsibility is to make your website easy and accessible for those search engines to crawl and index what’s there.
- Permission to index. It’s typical for developers to include a “NoIndex” tag while developing a website or page, which instructs search engines not to index the material. Check to see if there are any of these tags. If you don’t remove them, Google will ignore your content and won’t appear in relevant queries.
- Meta description. A meta description is required for each page. If your website check reveals empty meta descriptions, go back and fill them in with relevant, keyword-friendly information.
- Content plugins. Some plugins might make your content impossible to index. Our website grader will inform you if any plugins are affecting content indexability. You should not be using Flash on your website since it hasn’t been supported since 2020, for example.
- Descriptive link text. Banish any links or buttons that say, “click here” or “read more.” They are not optimal for user experience in general and aren’t beneficial to SEO. Website connections should inform where they logically lead the user in order for them to perform the best.
3. Check Your Website’s Mobile Friendliness
It makes sense to follow a mobile-first strategy with your website at this point since most web traffic now comes from mobile clients. Even if your users are primarily on desktop computers, a mobile-first design will generally outperform a desktop-centric one — and Google made the shift to mobile-first indexing of all websites in 2021, incorporating Core Web Vitals into its search algorithm. Here’s what the website grader checks:
- Font sizes. The most important thing to remember about font size is that your text should be readable at 100 percent. Your smallest font should not be smaller than 12 pixels, or else it will be difficult to read. In fact, you’re probably better off going for 16px on the small side.
On the other side, be cautious about how big your headings are for mobile devices. If headlines break (when a long word has to wrap to a second line), have a developer change the font size at mobile widths to repair the problem.
- Tap targets. Consider the last time you tried clicking on your phone on a link that was meant to be viewed with a mouse. Isn’t it annoying?
Keep in mind that when compared to the mouse cursor, fingers are larger. The tap targets check can tell you if your links and buttons are big enough to be easily clicked with a finger. If they aren’t large enough, make them 48×48 pixels or larger and ensure there is plenty of room between them.
- Responsiveness. By now, nearly all websites are responsive, which means the layout adjusts automatically depending on the device used to visit it. However, tables, for example, may have an impact on response time. If there are problems with the website grading system, work with a designer or developer to change non-responsive elements so that they function on mobile devices.
4. Check Your Website’s Security
A secure website protects your users’ data and protects your site from crashing or being slowed down by malware or other attacks. Our website grader reviews a couple of fundamentals to help ensure a secure website.
- HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). This is a security feature that encrypts the data flow between your site and its users to ensure privacy. It’s a minimum user standard for an online safety. If you don’t have HTTPS on your website, work with a developer to make it HTTPS-compliant or move to a website hosting service that automatically uses the secure protocol.
- Secure JavaScript libraries. Almost all websites use a JavaScript library, such as jQuery. Many sites use more than one. Our check makes sure the libraries your site is running are up to date and have no known vulnerabilities.
If the grading tool detects an issue, work with a developer to update your libraries, or rebuild site elements so libraries aren’t required.
Get Your Grade and Start Making Improvements
When you get your website grade and report, you’ll know exactly where to start making improvements that will have a significant influence on how well your site performs. Some of the changes are simple, while others may necessitate the assistance of an expert — but at least performing a check is a good first step. Head on over to our quick and easy Free Website Grader to get started. Just click the link below.
