How to assess the health of your website before a disaster strikes

Today’s message is a friendly reminder that the Internet is one of the most dynamic places in the world. Yes, we can realize that millions of people perform legitimate searches on it every second of every day, but it is easy to forget the unscrupulous people and their malware is also by their side in significant quantities.

Keeping your website healthy and safe are the most essential marketing and maintenance issues in 2019, and a little preventative maintenance is worth a pound of cure.

Customers who come to me with a broken website or a poorly performing site are often surprised to learn that …

• your website has been hacked or compromised in any way

• lack of web server maintenance exposes security vulnerabilities

• Web server updates often break site plugins creating increased security vulnerabilities and performance issues.

• Web server firewall settings and updates have been neglected, which means your website is now exposed to direct attacks and vulnerabilities.

• Improper installation and configuration of the web server has made the site vulnerable to malware and direct attacks.

There are a variety of professional tools that web developers use to measure the specific health of their website. For website owners, HubSpot provides one of the most popular tools for a quick overview. Your Website Grader provides useful information on where improvements can be made regarding the overall health of your website.

As you check your website for security vulnerabilities and performance issues, take a few extra minutes and put on your marketing hat to ask yourself this question: What is the search ranking of my website? In addition to being essential for obvious reasons, you may not realize that your website’s search ranking is partially driven by certain factors that are directly related to your overall health, so they are inextricably intertwined. Reviewing one without the other can quickly lead to a misdiagnosis of the overall health of your website.

Search ranking is the best indicator of your site’s visibility in given search terms and sentences that match your products and services. It is not difficult to learn if you have the right tool, and this tool is a free service that we offer to all website owners, whether they are a customer or not.

Without a doubt, the search ranking of your website is a very complex and dynamic process. Since Google has at least 80% of the search market in North America, what concerns us most is Google’s rank number, which is based on more than 200 factors. It is the best way to know how likely your website is to be visible to any number of related searches. And since your website’s ranking is dynamically factored, your ranking at any given time is a snapshot according to current conditions. A high search ranking is the Holy Grail of search engine optimization (SEO).

If your search rank is not where you want to agree with your SEO Scorecard, don’t worry. Even if you score low for certain keywords (<70), my SEO experts can help you improve your rankings from month to month.

As mentioned above, some of the most weighted SEO factors are related to the performance, responsiveness, and security of your website. This is how it is related.

For example, an experienced web developer can analyze and mitigate any performance and security issues related to,

• Non-optimized programming

• Page responsiveness not optimized (visibility on mobile devices)

• SPAM hacks

• Slow host server

• Host server too far (slow page load)

• Image files of wrong size

• Too many unnecessary plugins

• Obsolete plugins

• Unnecessary redirects

• Outdated CMS

• … and, we’re just getting started!

If any of the above reports or information motivates you to improve your website ranking (SEO), performance and / or security, please contact me for a no obligation consultation. I’m here to help you seize business opportunities by utilizing the best and most affordable website design techniques coupled with expert-level services in Kansas City and beyond.