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. That’s why it’s crucial to be extremely diligent when maintaining your website. As website designers & developers, we’ve developed a daily checklist of the four of the most important web design checks 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. It’s especially important when paid media is live!
As you or your web design team are checking, one thing to keep in mind is website 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 may missing something, 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. That means the CDN, server, and browser must be cleared. You can also use a service, like UptimeRobot to notify you and your team of when your website is completely down.
Check Your Website Contact Forms for Web Design Issues
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 to confirm:
- Do all of your lead submission data:
- Get stored on your database?
- Get routed and stored on your CRM (if you’re using one)?
- Trigger an email notification that’s sent 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. If this happens, you’ll need to tweak the settings 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 for Web Design Differences
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 from above. However, if time is a concern, 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. It’s something that your web design team should be doing routinely.
Check Your 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 that your backups work as intended. If you’re unsure of how to do this, consider having a web design team support your backup efforts.
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 Uplancer today to get help with testing strategies, execution, and help for managing your website.
