Blog | 06 February 2018
Ensure website quality and enhance user experience
Do you take the time to review the quality of your website? If not, it's high time. By quality assuring your website, you can raise standards and user-friendliness, making it easier to retain your users.
It is important to review the errors that can affect the UX, the user experience, of the website. Errors can sometimes be small but still have big consequences, especially if they start to accumulate. Many companies and organisations do not have procedures for link quality assurance, which means that the content on the web platform can lose value and the website can lose users.
High quality – rank higher on Google
For many businesses, the website is the main space where news and information is published and crucial in digital marketing. Therefore, it is important that the information is accurate and looks good – a website with spelling mistakes, difficult navigation and broken links does not inspire confidence. The easier it is for the visitor to navigate, the better the site's UX will be.
The first step to quality assuring a website is to dedicate enough time to it and to do it properly, especially if it hasn't been part of your routine before. After that, it might be a good idea to put a reminder in the calendar every
month to continuously review and maintain quality.
If you are good and maintain your website regularly, not only will the quality be higher, but Google will also appreciate your efforts. Pages with poor maintenance can lose ranking in the search engine and if you have outdated SEO words, the visitor who found you via Google will be frustrated. In other words, quality assurance is a work in progress.
Quality assure both content and functionality
Quality assurance itself can be divided into two parts: one focuses on the technical aspects and the other on the content itself. The technical part is about checking that all links work properly and that pages have no validation or accessibility errors. Accessibility is simply about making your website accessible to as many people as possible, which is nice if you've put a lot of effort into making it look good and filled with strategic information. The check is done on all subpages and ensures that everything is technically in good shape. In a modern and simple CMS, you can quickly check it on each subpage with the click of a button, so you don't have to go through all the links manually, for example. It couldn't be more fun.
Checking the content of your website is even more time-consuming. Here you look at things like structures, descriptions and texts. It is important that the text has a high
readability is important for the visitor to easily absorb the message of the text, for example, the texts are written in a language that most people understand or the font size is comfortable for the reader's eyes. Avoid unnecessarily complicated jargon. Also check if there are texts and posts that are no longer relevant, or if there are subpages that are similar and can be merged. This gives the user a better overview, while reducing the number of pages web editors have to go through during the next quality assurance check – win-win.
3 tips for quality assurance
- Add cleaning events to your calendar. In the same way that you might plan when to do a spring clean, you should plan when to go through your website.
- Think about what materials you are clearing out. When you remove material, look at what other content goes with it. You may need to reword or restructure or re-link in some places. Being linked to places that no longer exist is very annoying.
- Remove anything that is cumbersome. As soon as users encounter difficulties, frustration builds and you risk losing them to a site that works in a simpler way. Whether it's language, headings or functions, keep everything as simple and logical as possible.