When it comes to managing your website, you need to be extremely protective of what customers see. It’s the digital portal for customers to engage with your brand, so how do you want to be seen as a business? That’s why being extremely diligent when maintaining your website is crucial to your brand. Let’s dive into four of the most important daily checks to do on your website.
Check Your Website Address
This is a no-brainer and is as easy as confirming whether your website address takes you to your website or an error page. We get asked a lot why their site isn’t working. The answer all depends on your website’s architecture; things can happen to your website from one day to the next that can negatively impact your website’s functionality. This applies from the individual web pages to your whole website and is especially important when paid media is live.
One thing to keep in mind as you’re reviewing your website address is caching. Caching saves old data and displays it on your browser. Therefore, if you aren’t clearing out your cache each time you check your website address, you risk missing when an issue occurs, such as pages showing a browser error, massive layout shifts, and majorly wrong styling.
The next time you do this check, make sure that you’ve got caching cleared at all levels of your website, including at the CDN, server, and browser. You can also use a service, like https://uptimerobot.com/ to notify you and your team of when your website is completely down.
Check Your Website Contact Forms
This is your primary and, in some cases, your only means of collecting customer leads, so don’t let this check go unnoticed. As you check, there are a lot of moving parts:
- Does the submitted lead information get stored in your database?
- Does the submitted lead information get sent to your CRM (if you’re using one)?
- Does the submitted lead information trigger a notification email to a certain inbox?
- If you’ve got a spam blocker on your website, does it block your legitimate submission? Sometimes, the blocker is too sensitive, causing normal submissions to get blocked, requiring tweaking or using a different spam blocker.
- Do all of your contact forms across each page work?
- Do the other integrations that are firing, such as Google Tag Manager or some custom code, work alongside your form? Sometimes, these integrations are updated and as a result, cause the form or these integrations to fail.
With the above in mind, it’s good to have all the integrations and services tied to your contact forms pulled up. Confirm that you’re not missing any data along each step of your contact form submission workflow.
Check Your Website on Different Devices
With thousands of devices out there, it’s impossible to check on every device whether your website is working daily. Focus on one from each of the following device types: Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. Confirm that your homepage and any other major pages are loading properly and that any on-page features work as expected.
On each device, the browser type (Chrome, Safari, Edge) can contribute to a bad website experience. That’s why it’s a good idea to check on the different browser types in addition to the four device types above. However, time is always a concern and if you only have time for one browser check, we suggest always focusing on Chrome since it has the largest market share. This check is worth the time investment and can quickly eliminate silly mistakes that negatively impact website conversions.
Check Your Website Backups
Your website backups should be configured automatically and at a cadence that makes sense for your business. You’ll find that at times, your backup protocol or software may fail, resulting in no backups or corrupt backups. That’s why it’s important that you routinely check your backups to confirm that they are working as intended and can be used when it’s actually needed.
The Bottom Line / TLDR
Make sure to confirm that your website address, contact forms, devices, and backups are working. They contribute to a better website experience and result in a reliable lead-generation workflow. Connect with us today to get help with testing strategies, execution, and help for managing your website.
