Five ways to tell if your website is well made

As a website owner it can often feel like a gamble when employing a freelancer or agency to build and manage your website. So how can you find out if the site you get is well built?

The good news is that you don’t need to be a technical expert to do do this. With just a few simple tools and knowing where to look, you can get a good impression of the health of your site – and the quality of the designers and developers you’ve employed.

1. Google speed test

How quickly your site loads is important. Users like pages that load quickly and the slower a page loads, the more likely a user is to give up and look elsewhere. And don’t be fooled into thinking you can keep users waiting for long – fractions of a second can make big differences when it comes to load time. What you’ll never know is how many people don’t make it. Because if your page does’t load, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see that person as a user in your website’s analytics data.

And it’s not just users you need to worry about. Because Google (other search engines are available) takes page load time very seriously, too. They know it upsets users, so they use it as a key ranking signal when deciding what position you appear in search results.

So how do you test page load speed? Well, helpfully, Google have a tool for that. Head over to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your URL. You’ll see a score out of 100 for mobile and desktop devices, and another score for mobile user experience. If you’re in the 80’s or above, you’re probably doing OK. Any lower and you should have a chat with your agency to see what can practically be done with the design and style of site you have.

2. Website crawler

Finding broken links, duplicate or long title tags, missing images or blocked search engine robots could involve checking every page and link manually. But we’d all rather surf, or run, or drink coffee, right? Luckily, there are some free and easy-to-use tools our there that will help you see just how neatly strung your site is. Remember, users hate things like broken links, so search engines take a similarly dim view. So find out what’s what and let your devs know if there are any problems. There are a lot of tools out there, but here are two that I use:

SEO Crawler

Rob Hammond’s free online website crawler tool is quick and easy and you can export a list of the status of links on your site so you can easily share the results with your devs.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The Screaming Frog SEO Spiker app for Windows and Mac is quick to install but powerful in what it can do. It’ll show you all the working, broken and redirected links on your site, missing images, meta titles and descriptions, h1 titles and more. There are quite a few things to look at, but the most important are broken links and missing images, and missing, duplicate or lengthy title tags (they should ideally be no more than 50 characters).

3. Check your robots

A robot (or ‘spider’) is an automated computer programme run by search engines that acts like a visitor to your site – reading what’s on every page, checking the content, titles, images, code quality and load speed. They follow most links on a site, too – internal and external – checking out the darkest corners of your site and getting an impression about how good your website is, and what it’s about.

But it’s actually possible to ask these robots NOT to search your website. Which might be perfectly OK if it’s a private page, or a development version of your website. But not if it’s the live public site and you want search engine visibility. It’s particularly easy to forget to re-enable robots when moving a site from development to live, so it’s worth double checking – especially if you’ve suddenly disappeared from Google search results.

The first place to check is whether there is a robots.txt file on your site. It’s usually at the root. If it says anywhere Disallow: / (without anything after the forward slash) you should ring your dev immediately for them explain why and fix it if necessary.

Individual pages can also be blocked. Rob Hammond’s SEO crawler (above) is the easiest way to find out. But if you’re feeling adventurous and want to check manually, open up a page in your web browser and look at the source code (in Chrome on the Mac, it’s in View>Developer>View Source). Near the top of the source code, in between the opening and closing <head> tags, look for a meta="robots" tag. If it says “noindex”, ring your developer and ask why.

4. Browser and device testing

Your favourite browser isn’t the only one your users are viewing your site in. As a minimum, install on your computer the latest versions of Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer (if you’re on Windows). Have a look at the site in all of those and see if there are any obvious bugs. Don’t worry about it looking exactly the same in each browser. No site does. It’s just the way different browsers are. But, in modern browsers, they should be pretty similar.

If you have a smartphone - an iPhone or Android phone for instance - see how the website looks on there too. Ask around the office or your family for anyone with a different phone to yours and check your website out on it. Note any bugs you spot.

Some users will unfortunately still be stuck on older devices and operating systems. It’s less easy to check for these as people your know upgrade, but if you have an old PC hanging around with Internet Explorer 8 installed, keep it in the corner and turn off the automatic updates. IE8 is the last of the old, troublesome browsers that’s hanging on with any significant user numbers, so it pays to be able to see how your site behaves in it. Don’t expect it to be the same as the latest Google Chrome - IE8 is a not a very clever browser. Some styling, features, animations and general ‘wow’ might be lost or deliberately simplified by your developers (I routinely disable responsive stylesheets for IE8). Focus on the important content and calls to action being accessible and the layout not looking like a total car crash.

If you can’t get to a working copy of Internet Explorer 8, there are a number of free screenshot-based services that will give you at least a visual guide to how your site looks.

If you have Google Analytics installed (see below), take a look at the Audience>Technology>Browser & OS tab and look at the browsers your users are actually using. You might find nobody is using IE8 any more and you can forget about it. Or you’ll find that users of a particular browser have an unusually high bounce rate (they leave without looking at any other pages), which might indicate there’s a problem with your site in that browser version.

Browser testing – and fixing the bugs it can uncover – is a skilled task, but you can quickly spot where things are going badly wrong and make sure you get your dev to fix things and do a more thorough check.

5. Website analytics

Do you have website analytics installed? Well you should. Website analytics will tell you how many people are coming to your site, how long they stay, what they look at (and don’t), where they come from and how often they come back. You can even track how often they look at your contact page, or purchase from your online store.

Understanding website analytics is worth the effort. But first of all you need to collect data. Google provide an excellent, almost ubiquitous tool called Google Analytics. If you don’t know if you have Google Analytics installed, chances are it isn’t there or your dev just hasn’t told you yet. Ask them. And make sure you get them to give you full Administrator privileges on your login so you’re in control of your data should you ever part company.

Over time, website analytics will allow you to see how well your site is working for your business, and whether any further work you commission is paying a return on investment for you.

Don’t be scared

You shouldn’t be scared about checking these things, or about raising concerns with your agency or developers. You’re the client after all, and it’s your hard cash and future business success that matters the most. So knowing what you’re looking at will give you confidence when you’re commissioning or managing suppliers. It’ll also tell them that you’re on the ball and can’t have any wool pulled over your eyes.

Not all devs are like that, of course. In fact, the majority of us work hard to do our best, and will be happy to give your site a once-over for you. But if you check yourself first, you don’t need to rely solely on someone else’s word for it.