Analyzing Your Websites Performance

As easy at it may sound, many business owners neglect to analyze their website's performance after it's original conception. Similar to your friend in high school who did an engine swap on an old Honda Civic, painted flames on the side, and called the car "his baby," business owners tend to have a fear of change when it comes to their websites. And truthfully, I respect their hesitance. Like the old adage goes "if it ain't broke don't fix it."

The key flaw in this rationale is that while a website may not be hurting your businesses' overall performance, it can often times deter potential clients through poor performance, poor user interface, lack of accessibility, or lack of visibility on search engines such as Google or Bing.

Determining if it's time for your website to be revamped can be broken up into 4 categories:

1. Performance - how fast your website is.

2. Accessibility - can users with assistive services use your site?

3. Best Practices - are you using text that is easy to read and makes sense?

4. Search Engine Optimization - can search engines understand what is being presented on your site?

Each category is graded from 1-100. Both mobile and desktop versions of sites are ranked independently.

Why are Mobile and Desktop Website Performances Analyzed Separately?

Mobile and desktop are ranked separately for two main reasons:

Example of Mobile vs Desktop UX Design

1. Mobile user experience is different on both platforms. For instance, the home page for jayvanderslice.com is different on mobile devices than it is on desktop.

2. Mobile devices and cell phones render pages in different browsers that have more to account for. For instance, some mobile devices come with specific Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) rules like resizing the images inside of the browser.

Performance

Performance analysis is typically performed using Lighthouse 10,

"Lighthouse is a website auditing tool that helps developers with opportunities and diagnostics to improve the user experience of their sites."[1]

10% First Contentful Paint

10% Speed Index

25% Largest Contentful Paint

30% Total Blocking Time

25% Cumulative Layout Shift

It's important to note that, unfortunately for most business owners (including myself), not every factor is fully in your control if you use a service to host your website / domain.

While performance is arguably the most important category (as it directly effects a portion of the user experience that can effect conversions and a user's time spent on your site), in my experience, most websites who use hosting services such as Weebly, Wix, or high-level WordPress IDEs generally score around 50-75 in the performance category.

Accessibility

Website Accessibility evaluations are performed using axe user impact assessments.

Accessibility is the evaluation of your website's digital properties and how well they confirm with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)[r1] and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)[r2].

The lengthy assessment measures each element of your website to make sure it has proper documentation; allowing for users who rely on assistive devices such as screen readers for consuming media and information.

In short, every image, button, page and element must have alt text, meta descriptions, and proper <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> tags.

Best Practices

Best practices is exactly as it sounds, are you following common industry-standard practices on your website?

Two of the most common best practices overlooked is visible text, and tap targets. Text visibility is the difficulty it is to read a body of text. For example, choosing black text in this blog would be a poor choice.

Bonus tip: text size also effects your text visibility score.

Tap targets generally pertain generally to mobile consumption. Tap targets are the invisible boundary in which a user must tap their finger in order to follow a hyperlink or redirect.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO essentials produce the vital parts of what makes your website's content such as images, videos, webpages, and other publicly-available material a search engine can find by crawling the internet, is eligible to appear and perform well during appropriate searches.

If you run a business that requires disclaimers, such as HIPPA Compliance / PHI release information for healthcare companies or ITAR Compliance for manufacturing and international trade, it's important to display these compliances in a format that search engines can understand.

If you collect contact information, it's important to provide an anti-spam policy, privacy policy, and other disclaimers that may apply in your businesses' area of operation.

It's important to note, that even if your page does not have properly formatted SEO elements, search engines may still crawl, index, and or serve your content to their users.

Putting it all together

Understanding how your website is graded is extremely important. While the performance category generally is around 60-75, your websites Accessibility, Best Practices, and Search Engine Optimization should always remain above a 95 to remain competitive (especially if you pay for advertising on any search engine).

My go-to for learning up-to-date website information and industry standards will always be surfing through YouTube.

To learn more about how to start optimizing your website, book a complimentary website evaluation by clicking the button below and filling out a short form. My services aim to give you the tools to excel on your own as a business owner, and to make your marketing your message.

Sources

[1]

Kenny, Brendan. “What’s New in Lighthouse 10 : Blog : Chrome for Developers.” Chrome for Developers, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, 9 Feb. 2023, developer.chrome.com/blog/lighthouse-10-0#:~:text=Lighthouse%20is%20a%20website%20auditing,npm%20and%20in%20Chrome%20Canary.

View the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

References

[r1] Learn more about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Here: https://www.ada.gov/

[r2] Learn more about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Here: https://www.w3.org/standards/history/WCAG21/