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How to Monitor the Health of Your Website

Angela Manning Business , , , ,
How to Monitor the Health of Your Website

If you aren’t monitoring your website health, you could be at serious risk and not even know about it. There are viruses and hackers at large every day online and they are looking for sites to attack. Even if you don’t have problems with a hacker, your site could be experiencing website issues that can be remedied to ensure that you give the best results to your users as well as get the best rankings possible in the search engines.

What Should You Look For?

There are so many things you can look for when you are checking your website’s health. These things include:

  • Management
  • Content & Features
  • Strategic Issues
  • Marketing & Promotion
  • Usability & Design
  • Revenue and Savings
  • Technical Issues

For your site to be functioning at its best, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of the website. If you aren’t paying attention, you may find yourself dealing with a major technical problem that has your site down for days or there may be a big design flaw on your site that you don’t notice.

Whatever is going on with your site, you need to make sure that you know about it so that you can quickly fix the problem and ensure that your site is up and running.

One of the tools that you can use to make sure that your site is up and running and your hosting isn’t taking a break is a uptime status checker. When you use one of these tools, you will be able to tell if your site has gone down or if you’ve had a perfect uptime. If you notice that your site has been down, you are probably experiencing issues with your host. If you have host issues, you should contact them right away to ensure that these are fixed immediately.

When your site is down, you are losing potential subscribers and leads which means you are losing the ability to convert them into customers and so the final conclusion is that you are losing sales.

Google Analytics

Did you know that Google gives you powerful analytic tools to use for your site for free? You can check almost any metric you want to see regarding your site if you’ve set up Google Analytics on your site. There are many ways to filter information and it can get confusing, but we are going to give you some tips so you can understand how to check your website’s health with GA.

If you are going into Google Analytics, looking at your graphs and coming out as confused as when you went in, it doesn’t have to be that way.

When you look at your Google Analytics, you need to look at your site’s bounce rate. If you notice that your bounce rate is high, there is something wrong. Having a high bounce rate will hurt you in the search engines, but it is also telling you that you aren’t keeping your users on your site past the first page. This means there is little interest in what you have to say so they are clicking away from the site.

If you have a low bounce rate, that shows that people are interested in what you have to say and are finding other pages on your site helpful after viewing the initial landing page. This also leads to an increase in time on your site which is another important metric that you need to pay attention to when you are checking your site health.

Page Speed

You can check how quickly your site is loading through PageSpeed Insights. It is important to have a quick and well optimized website that provides a great user experience to your visitors. Many people are still loading websites from slow connections so ensure that your site is allowing them the quickest load possible. If you match a slow site with a slow connection, it can seem like it is taking a lifetime to load the content on your site.

The fastest your site loads, the more you will be able to retain your visitors and longer retention means more time to convert them into subscribers and then on to customers.

Continually Optimizing Your Site

Even after you have optimized your site and you see that you are getting good results, you need to keep a watch on your site. It is easier to fix small challenges than to fix big problems. If you find out that you are experiencing big problems due to no checking on your website health enough, the best time to start keeping a good check is right now.

Set up schedules and reminders that will help you stay on track with monitoring your site. Improving your site’s speed by a second could mean a world of difference for conversion so continue to test and see how you can make your site better. There are many options for optimizing available and as you are learning about your site’s health, you will see what you need specifically to improve any challenges that you might having.

Conclusion

Keeping up to day with the latest technologies and software is important for keeping your site safe and functioning properly. Make sure that you set up regular backups in case your site does have any problems and periodically check to make sure any plugins that you are using are up to date and functioning well with your CMS.

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How to Set Up a Blog in Under an Hour

Angela Manning Business, Tech , , ,
How to Set Up a Blog in Under an Hour

Blogging is a great way of expressing your likes, passions and interests online, you can use blogging as a platform to make money or even to create a community based on something that you love. The beauty of blogging is that anyone can set up a website on any topic of their choosing and then write about it, upload photos or videos and encourage others to share in the fun.

Many people are put off making a blog because they think that they need to be technically minded or super computer literate but this simply isn’t the case. In fact, you can set up a blog in under an hour, and here’s how.

Pick a Topic

The first place to start is to think about what kind of blog you want, in this case it is important that you pick  atopic which is a little more niche than simply writing about life in general. A niche topic like photography for example, is more likely to gain a more loyal following.

Pick a Name and Buy It

Next up is deciding what the name of your blog will be, once you have decided go to a website like GoDaddy, search for the woman name and see if it is available. Assuming that it is, you can buy it for a very reasonable price, usually around $10, if the name isn’t available then look for a slightly different name or a different extension such as .org or .net.

Find a Host

You need someone to host your website, imagine having a house which you need to find land for, it is the same thing with a website. With a quick Google search you can find a host and set up a plan, this will cost you a small amount each month.

Use a CMS

A CMS is a content management system, these are the pieces of software which allow you to run your website without the need for technical knowledge. You will need to follow the step-by-step guides to convert your website to the CMS and then you can start setting up your own site. The most popular CMS’ are WordPress and 121.

Design the Site

Don’t be put off by web design, this is made easy using a CMS and there are many preset themes which you can choose from. Most themes can be tweaked to your liking and you can alter colors, fonts and layouts with the click of a button.

Publish Content

The final piece of the puzzle is to start publishing your content based on your chosen subject. This is the part where you will actually be filling out your website with the stuff you like and you can post articles, photos and videos directly on to your site with ease.

And there you have it, your very own website in less than an hour, you can tweak and change the site as much as you like in the future and work on getting more traffic based on the content you have written, simple as that!