1. Is it mobile friendly?

Right now there’s more mobile traffic on the web than any other type, even more mobile traffic than desktop traffic, by a small margin [source]. If your website looks shonky on mobile devices it’s serving a frustrating or broken experience for half of your potential users. That’s a major put-off.

Examples of bad mobile optimisation:

• Content is scaled way too small, forcing users to zoom in and move around to find the right info, like on a map
• Content is too wide for the screen
• Links are too small or other clickable elements are too close together, making them awkward to tap on a touchscreen
• Text is too small to read
• Built with outdated technologies not used by mobile devices, like Flash

A website may look OK on mobiles at first glance but it’s always worth running it through this free mobile test tool to see what comes up.

2. Is it slow to load?

The experts say that as the load time of a web page increases from 1 second to 7 seconds, the probability of a mobile visitor bouncing (leaving again right away) increases 113%. [Source: Think With Google].

The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load. [Source: Google Developers]

The average time a mobile web page takes to load on a 4G connection is 14 seconds. The average on a 3G connection is 19 seconds. [Source: Google DoubleClick blog]

In 2016 75% of global mobile users were on 2G or 3G. [Source: GSMA Mobile]

Here’s a tip to check the speed performance of your website and see what you can do about it.

3. Is it secure?

Having a security certificate allows all communication between your website host and visitors to be encrypted. This protects critical visitor info which is especially vital (and a legal requirement) for websites handling banking data, like ecommerce websites or charities taking donations.

Additionally, many browsers show big warnings when visitors browse to an insecure website, like this URL bar notice:

Or even this worrying error message:

There’s much more to security than this though. A few basic security questions to consider:

• Is everything up to date? What version of PHP is your site running on? What about your content management system? Are all your plugins up to date?
• Is brute force login protection set up? This locks visitors out if they try to guess a password too many times.
• Are all admin passwords difficult enough to guess? Here’s a tool to check password security.

Of course, we can help! Feel free to drop us a message if you’d like a little free advice on your website, or if you’d like to (re)build your website with modern design and technologies.