User experience on your website can make or break a sale. Imagine going to a website of someone you’re thinking of hiring but the lead form isn’t loading and you can’t find what you want so you exit the site 10 seconds later. You don’t ever want your potential clients to leave your site. That’s why it’s super important to keep checking on your overall site performance.

Below are a list of 8 website areas to check up on:

1. Site speed. You want your site to load as fast as possible. You can check your speed using Google’s Page Speed test. It will show you both the mobile and desktop grade.
2. Mobile site. Make sure that your site is mobile friendly and that users don’t have any issues reaching your site on their phones. Check out Google’s test.
3. Photo loading speed. An easy way to increase website speed is to make sure that your photos are compressed under 500kb. If you recently had a photoshoot with a brand photographer, make sure you ask for website optimized photo sizes. You can also use a website like tinyPNG.
4. Image quality. Make sure you are using clear, crisp images. If you haven’t hired a photographer yet, use stock imagery. My favorite sites are Pexels and Unsplash for free photography and Moyo Studio for paid imagery and mockups.
5. Contact forms. Periodically check all of your contact or lead forms to make sure that they’re still working. I’ve had people reach out to me saying that my contact form was cut off on the mobile site but I had no idea because I edited the site on the desktop version and forgot to check the mobile! I imagine I lost a few potential clients because of this tech mistake.
6. Website messaging. If someone were to visit your site homepage right now, would they understand what it is that you do and/or sell within 5 seconds? I see a lot of websites that don’t clearly explain this in the first 2 or 3 sections on the homepage. You will lose visitors this way. Increase your website performance by clearly outlining what your business ideally above the fold on your homepage.
7. SEO. Search engine optimization is an important measure for getting seen on Google. I know when you’re working on your website, sometimes you don’t want to label all of your images and pages. So it’s always good practice to carve out some time monthly to go through and make sure all of your images have tags and labels and all of your pages have descriptions for Google. For example, if you just downloaded a stock photo of someone working on a laptop, the file name is probably DXY8952. Change the file name to Graphic Designer New Orleans.
8. Google Analytics. Google analytics can be your best friend here. It can tell you which of your pages are performing the best. How long people are staying on certain pages. How many visitors you’re getting each month and much more. It’s good practice to check out your Google Analytics on a monthly basis to increase performance and see where and when you’re getting the most traffic.

And if you’re looking for ways to improve your overall design layout for a better user experience, make sure you check out my blog post on website design tips.