Optimize Your Website to be More User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly with This Handy 18-Point Checklist

Are you building or updating a website? Here’s a handy checklist to make sure you are getting the most value from your developer and keeping your visitors happy.

Here are some of the things I look for when creating a WordPress site (in no particular order):

• The site needs to load quickly (You can do speed tests to find out what’s slowing your site down)
• The site is optimized for mobile phones (Responsive design themes will resize themselves automatically for web, tablet, and phone by re-positioning the columns)
• The site is free of viruses or malware (a security plugin or upgraded hosting can do this for you). In the past, I have heard developers complain that some WordPress themes contain links to other sites, so I always go with paid themes that offer support
• The menus and navigation are clear and easy to follow
• There’s a privacy policy and/or terms of service (usually with a link in the footer)
• It needs to be cookie compliant for EU site visitors (lots of plugins for this are available)
• The site has a sitemap for search engines so it can be indexed properly on search engine results pages.
• The photos are optimized to load quickly and not take up a lot of the visitors’ data plans if they are on mobile. To optimize the on-page SEO of your article or blog post, make sure the name of the photos have keywords related to the topic (not names like Photo1.jpg, that doesn’t help your SEO at all) and that the photos have “alt” tags that describe the photos with keywords related to the blog post or article.
• The logo fits on a mobile screen
• If you enable comments, make sure they are moderated to prevent spam posing as comments (Askimet is a good plugin for this and is made by Automattic, the company that provides WordPress)
• To measure traffic, use an analytics program such as Google Analytics or your choice of analytics (JetPack, also made by Automattic is good for basic analytics)
• Make Social sharing buttons available for every article so people can share your content
• Essential: If you are running WordPress, make sure your hosting company is using the most recently updated version of PHP (the coding language used for WordPress)
• Also Essential: The site uses the current version of WordPress and all plugins need to be up to date. If a plugin has not been updated recently, deactivate it and replace it with a similar plugin that has been tested to work with the current version of WordPress. If you want to keep the old plugin, watch for it to show “update available” on the Plugins page of the WordPress Dashboard in case the developer updates it and makes it safe to use again. This is an important maintenance task to protect your site from hackers (you still need a firewall)
• If you are earning affiliate commissions from links, they need to be disclosed
• Make the content valuable for visitors and make sure it matches your metadata (keyword and descriptions) to avoid people hitting the “back” button
• Make it easy for people to do what you want them to do such as subscribe or buy — test the site as if you were a buyer and see where they get stuck and fix it
• Make sure your icon files are working. Favicon.ico is the filename for the small logo in the address bar on a web browser, and apple-touch-icon, also known as the Apple icon for Web Clips, is the logo used to save the site to the home screen of an iPhone, iPad and iPod so it doesn’t just look like a tiny version of a web page.
• Bonus: If you share an article on social media, make sure the link goes to the article and not the home page. People are not patient enough to do a search most of the time and they will leave.

So, there you have it — a basic checklist to make your site as user-friendly and search engine-friendly as possible.

Did I miss anything? Add your suggestions in the comments.