Five Minute Friday: Website Health Check- 3 Checks Everyone Should Be Running!

Hi, I'm Angela with Hot Mess Consulting, and we do Shopify websites and brands, like really, really well. Check out our website@hot messhustle.com for some examples of our work. We offer a free call where we can give you some input and just see if we're even a fit for what we offer. But today I just wanted to run through some things that you can do on your own website to give it a bit of a health check. And this is something that I suggest. It's not something that I think that unless you're a solopreneur, I know then you wear all the hats. But if you have a team, this is really something that you should, you know, set up into a little process. It could be as easy as a checklist of things to check on the website that is automatically emailed to a specific team member on the first of every month. And it's like, hey, reminder to do our monthly website health check. And this is just to make sure that nothing surprises you. I mean, obviously within that month something else could go wrong. But if you're checking monthly, that's a pretty good starting point. We do also offer this as a service and it's not super high cost, but. Okay. What I suggest if you're going to do a health check is first of all, the first thing is just a basic link check. Now this one can be a little bit tedious, especially if you have a ton of links. So you may want to adjust your process around a little bit. But what that means to me is double checking basically all the links on your website. So start with the announcement bar, every menu, and your main menu and your footer menus. And then on your homepage there's generally some call to action buttons and things like that throughout the page. So it's really just taking that time. And this is why the owner shouldn't be doing this normally. However, the very first time that you go through to do this, it would be good to make that checklist and then maybe even make a video of you doing some of the things obviously you don't need to show clicking every single link. You could pause while you're kind of doing that, but that way, you know, there's a proper training material for whoever is going to do it. And it's just really easy for them to do this kind of busy but important work. So. Yeah. So every other link that you want to check on the homepage, definitely. And you know your website best, there may be some other pages where you know that there's Important links that you just want to make sure that nothing has broken. Should anything ever break like this? No, but like, why not check it to be sure. If you're driving harder in traffic to your website, you want to make sure that everything is working. So, so you look professional, trustworthy. You know, if someone hits a dead link now, hopefully you have a decent, you know, a decently designed 404 error page. So maybe you won't lose them altogether, but you still may. So some of the things that I look for in main menu links. So this is where a lot of your links for clothing categories and subcategories are, right. So one of the things I suggest looking at is I'm actually looking at one of our clients websites right now as we speak, as I'm talking you through this. And they have a brands drop down with tons of really popular brands. But say they stopped carrying a brand one day and it could take them months and months to remove it from their website. But in the meantime it's adding to the list which is already long and could be a little bit overwhelming. And if somebody clicks on it, it's going to a totally empty collection. This can happen with seasonal collections, sale collections, types of products again that you no longer carry, that kind of thing. So when you're looking at the menu, it's not just are these all going to the right collection? Which they should be. There shouldn't have been any changes there. But this is where, especially if you have a team, you never know. Something super random changed on the back end. Like somebody was in a collection and they were changing it, the name of the collection, and now they didn't change it on the menu, you never know. Okay, but, but when you're looking at these, just making sure that you don't have any collections that only have like one item. Unless it's like, I know there are some like shoes, it's like those really don't fit in anywhere. And even if you only have one shoe, but you want it on your site, kind of got to have the shoe category. But in general, you know, like if you have subcategories and you go to a subcategory and there's only four, four items or less, you may not have enough items in order to. You might be trying to subcategorize too finely for the level of inventory that you have or at least of that product type. Now we're getting into menus, which is a whole nother thing, but that's just the type of thing that you want to look at for that. But otherwise we're just making sure that everything goes to the right place that it's supposed to go to. Everything is up to date. I mean, I guess while you're on here, I have seen websites that rarely get updated or checked. And so you might even have a whole banner that's talking about a collection or a season that's not relevant anymore. So check that while you're in there too. Um, the other thing that I like to do, so the main thing is the link check as well as the customer journey funnel check. And so what I like to do for this, and you need to make sure that you do it on both desktop and mobile. Okay. Because they're different experiences. Go to your website, go to a product, add it to cart, go to checkout. That seems very simple, but things can get in the way, right? We can add apps to our website that have widgets. All of a sudden we can have too many widgets. They can overlap each other. They can overlap an important checkout button. This happens all the time. So that's why it's always worth checking that there's nothing wrong in that flow. And let's see, if I was going to recommend one more thing, it would be to check out your collection page filters. So if you just go to any of your main collections and you click on filter, it might be, you know, tucked in. It might not be. First of all, do you have a filter set up? You should, unless you have a very small catalog, but even then you kind of should. And just make sure. What can happen here is if you, especially if you're using tags for filters, that list can get really long and messy. Ideally, if you're using tags, you have it set up in a way that you choose which tags that it doesn't just show all of your tags, because that can be a garbage laundry list right? Now, sometimes that requires a little bit of coding, depending on your theme. So if you, you know, don't want to do the coding and you want to just rely on the theme, which is not a bad idea because any coding to the theme means you can't just easily upgrade your theme with one click, you'll have to redo that coding too. But if you are just using the theme, then you just need to be really clear with your tags. And this is where, again, if you're not paying attention, and especially if you have a team, but even if not, you know, people could be adding random tags, not understanding that it's an important part of, you know, what's going on here. And while we're at it, color swatches is another thing that you can check for. So check that your filters aren't all messy. Um, and you can look at your sizes. This can happen with sizes as well. I'm just looking at, like, actually this client that I'm looking at is having some issues with her size filters, but that's just the kind of thing to clean up. And then for color swatches, if you're utilizing that, go to a product that you know would have the color swatches. Go into the product page if you need to. Because it depends on the theme, whether the color swatches show up on the, you know, when you're looking at it from the collection page or you need to go into the product. Either way, go to where you can see them. And I would look at. If you are using color swatches, I would look at a few products just to make sure this is a better spot check than just checking one. And just see if any of the color swatches are not working because this is something else that needs to be kept up with regularly. If you have a unique color name, you need to make sure that you upload the swatch into the content area of your dashboard. So settings on Shopify and name it. Right, exactly correct for that color. And so what's best is that you train your team that when they're uploading products, they use this set of colors as long as it fits in. Right. And so it would mean like maybe not using a color like mushroom gray, like let's call that light gray or whatever it is, you know, or maybe you do use mushroom gray enough. Fine, that's fine. Add the color swatch for it. Or if you just want to use those names, it's also no big deal. Just make sure that when there's a new color added to the mix, you're adding it to the color swatches. Okay. I think that would make a really solid health check. And if you have any questions, need a health check done by us. Need a full brand and website overhaul? We are your team. Hot Mess Consulting.

Hot messhustle.com that's it for Five Minute Friday, you guys. I hope you found some quick, actionable steps you can put into play in your business right away. As always, if you're not yet a member of the boutique hub, I would love to personally invite you to join us. It's where all of the daily conversations happen. The up to date what is working now in the industry conversations. The latest trainings, trend reports, discounts, resources and of course, access to thousands of wholesale brands that you also know and love. So please take a minute, follow the link in the show notes, and we would love to invite you to join us inside of the boutique hub.