Autumn tends to bring a pickup in enquiries for a lot of businesses – people are back from holidays, back at their desks, and starting to plan for the rest of the year. Before that happens, it’s worth spending twenty minutes giving your website a quick once-over. Here are five checks we’d recommend.
1. Check your site speed
A slow website costs you visitors before they’ve even seen what you offer. Run your homepage and a couple of key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and look out for anything flagged as poor. Common culprits are oversized images and too many plugins running at once.
2. Look for broken links
Old blog posts, outdated offers, or pages that have since been removed can leave broken links scattered across your site. These are easy to miss but frustrating for visitors – and they don’t do your SEO any favours either. A free tool like Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs) will scan your site and flag any 404s.
3. Test your contact forms
This one gets overlooked more often than you’d think. Submit a test enquiry through every form on your site – contact page, quote requests, newsletter sign-ups – and check it actually lands in the right inbox. A silently broken form can mean weeks of lost enquiries before anyone notices.
4. Check how your site looks on mobile
Most visitors will land on your site from a phone. Pull it up on your own mobile and click through as if you were a new customer – is the menu easy to use, does text wrap properly, do buttons work first tap?
5. Sense-check your rankings
If you’ve noticed rankings move about recently, you’re not imagining it – Google has pushed through a run of ranking volatility over the past few weeks, with several algorithm updates landing in quick succession. A dip right now isn’t necessarily a sign something’s wrong on your end; these things tend to settle. Worth keeping an eye on rather than reacting to straight away.
If any of these throw up something you’re not sure how to fix, that’s exactly the kind of thing we can help with. Get in touch for a free quick SEO check and we’ll take a look.