A Mid-Year Website Check in One Afternoon

Halfway

Today is the last day of June, the end of the first half of the year.

It is a good afternoon to ask whether the website has been doing its job since January, while there is still half a year to act on the answer.

The check needs the figures you noted in January, a phone, and about four hours without interruptions.

Five checks

• Enquiries, counted the same way as in January.
• The top pages, opened on a phone.
• Every form, sent and followed to the inbox.
• The listings, on Google and anywhere else customers look.
• The renewals due before the year ends.

The third check is where something broken usually turns up. Forms fail quietly: the visitor sees a thank-you message, and the email goes nowhere useful.

Enquiries against January

Start with the number the site exists to produce: calls, form submissions, bookings or orders, month by month since January.

Count them the same way you did then. If January's figure came from form emails in the inbox, use the inbox again; if it came from an Analytics goal, use the goal.

Then compare with the same months last year, if you have them. A dip from March to June means little for a business whose busy season is winter; a dip against last spring means more.

Note anything that changed in between: a new page, a campaign started or stopped, a phone number changed. Most unexplained movements find their explanation in that list.

The top pages, on a phone

In Analytics, the landing pages report lists the pages where visits begin. The top five often account for most of the visits.

Open each of them on a phone, on mobile data rather than the office Wi-Fi, the way a customer would.

Check the first screen: what the page is about, a phone number that can be tapped, nothing covering the page. Then scroll to the main button and press it.

Anything that annoys you in those five minutes has annoyed every visitor who arrived on that page since January.

Every form, end to end

Fill in every form on the site and send it, using your own details and a note saying it is a test.

Then follow it: whether the email arrived, in which inbox, how quickly, and whether it went to junk. If there is an automatic reply, read it as a customer would.

Try each form on a phone as well. Dropdowns, date pickers and required fields that behave on a computer often fail on a small screen.

If the site still runs on plain HTTP, note it: Chrome 62, due in October, will show "Not secure" as soon as a visitor types into a form.

A worked example

A boxing gym with four coaches runs fitness classes, a youth programme and a handful of competitive fighters. January is its busiest month; summer is quiet.

In January the owner had noted the trial class requests arriving by email each month. By June that number had dwindled, and she put it down to the season.

The Analytics goal for the form's thank-you page disagreed: people were still completing the form at about the usual summer rate.

A test submission settled it. The form sent its emails to a coach who had left in March, to an address that still existed and that nobody read.

The form now sends to a shared address two people check, with an automatic reply saying a coach will call within a day. Every request in the old mailbox got a call that week, with an apology.

Form recipients are now on the list of things to change when someone leaves, beside the door code and the social media passwords.

The listings

Search for the business on a phone and read the Google listing as a stranger would: hours, phone, address, photographs, newest reviews.

Summer is when hours most often go wrong. If yours change for July and August, the listing should say so now; since last week, a post on it can too.

Then check the other places customers find you, such as the Facebook page, Bing Places and Apple Maps, and reply to any review left unanswered since spring.

The renewals coming up

List everything with an expiry date between now and December: the domain name, the hosting plan, any paid security certificate, premium plugin or theme licences, and email accounts.

For each one, note the date, the cost, the card it will be charged to, and whose inbox receives the reminder.

That last column is where the trouble hides. Reminders going to a former employee, or charges going to a card that has since expired, are how working sites go offline on an ordinary Tuesday.

Free certificates usually renew themselves every few months; the certificate details in the browser show whether the last renewal happened.

Write it down

The product of the afternoon is a single page of notes: what you counted, what you found, and what needs fixing.

Sort the fixes into three groups: this week, before your busy season, and next year.

If you mapped the year's busy and quiet months in January, the second group already has a deadline. Anything the busy months depend on has to be finished before they start.

Then put the next check in the calendar. The end of December is the obvious date, and it will go faster with this page in hand.

The counter-case

Some businesses can make this shorter.

A site with no forms and a single page of services can be checked in an hour: the phone number, the listing and the renewals.

A site launched or rebuilt this spring is too new to compare with January; its first months are better spent watching how visitors use it.

And a business in its busiest weeks right now should not take an afternoon away from customers; the first quiet week in July will do.

For everyone else, half a year is long enough for something to have broken quietly, so spend the afternoon.

This afternoon

1. Count enquiries by month since January.
2. Open the top five pages on a phone.
3. Send every form and follow it to the inbox.
4. Read your Google listing as a stranger would.
5. List every renewal due before December.
6. Check whose inbox gets each reminder.
7. Write one page of notes and fixes.

Step three is the one to do if nothing else gets done. A broken phone number is noticed within a day; a form sending to the wrong inbox can fail for months behind a polite thank-you.

The busy and quiet months this check feeds into are mapped in a website year planned around your busy season.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.