3 Things To Check About Your Website During Lockdown

1. 3 Things To Check About Your Website During Lockdown We may now finally be at the point where some aspects of the recent restrictions on societies around the world have started to be lifted – but that’s all the more reason for you to check over aspects of your brand’s website that you may soon lack the time for. Your business may have traditionally been a largely brick-and-mortar one that has shifted online very recently due to the disruption brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Or maybe you’ve always had a website, and still have some spare time to scrutinise its suitability for a post-crisis world while business is slowly picking up again? Regardless, here are three technical aspects of your site that our Digital Marketing Consultants would suggest you take a look at now, while you might still have the hours or minutes during lockdown to do so. Your site’s core system and security Is the platform that your site is based on the most up-to-date version? Online business owners with sites running on WordPress, for example, may have easily missed the release of WordPress 5.4 on 31st March 2020, when a lot of merchants were busy dealing with the immediate impacts of the coronavirus outbreak. It’s also a good idea to look right now at any plug-ins that your site might be dependent on – are these all up to date, too? If not, this could present security risks. Your site’s performance As online business owners modify their sites over time, clutter may gather that effectively slows the site down. With Google using site speed as a signal for the

2. ranking of pages in its search engine results pages (SERPs) – to say nothing of the user experience implications – this is something that digital marketing consultants would really urge you to stay aware of. The great news is that there are various potential ‘quick wins’ for improving site speed, ranging from swapping existing large images for smaller ones, to enabling file compression and minifying CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Your site’s optimisation for mobile devices Google’s shift in recent years to mobile-first indexing means that if you are one of the longer-established online businesses we mentioned in the intro, you should have been working to make your website a better one for smartphone users months and years before COVID-19 came along. But even if you’ve been trading on the web for a while, you may have easily missed a few things affecting the responsiveness and seamlessness of the experience your site provides for those visiting it via mobile devices. Does your site have a responsive design, for example? Have you addressed speed concerns like those referenced above? Are ‘calls to action’ (CTAs) on your site conveniently located and intuitive to tap on for someone with a smartphone in their hand? And if you are an ecommerce business, how streamlined is your mobile checkout process? You really shouldn’t be forcing your smartphone-based visitors to go through one unnecessary page after another, just so that they can buy from you. Remember that as lockdowns gradually lift and we all return to something vaguely resembling ‘normal’ – or at least a ‘new normal’ – being well-prepared with your website will help to keep you one step ahead of the recovering competition in your industry. To talk to our own website designers and Digital Marketing Consultants here at PENNInk Productions about the wide-ranging site, search and support services that we could bring to your brand through the rest of 2020 and beyond, don’t wait any longer to call 020 8144 7931.