Fix These Website Flaws Now!
As with most technology trends, there is an upside and a downside to the recent broad acceptance and use of “off-the-shelf” website platforms, such as WIX, WordPress and Squarespace.
The upside is that web developers with limited experience and skill can easily and quickly create websites. The downside is that the underlying code is not search engine friendly, and therefore can significantly damage your website rankings. (If the website is placed on a brand new URL, the code can hold back the rankings.)
Our CEO, Dr David Evans, was recently asked by Modern Aesthetics magazine to write about this very topic. His article, “Fix these Website Flaws Now” was published in the May/June 2018 issue. It focuses on three coding flaws that plague off-the-shelf website platforms — index bloat, excessive 404 errors and site load speeds — and outlines how these flaws can drag down rankings, traffic, revenue and ROI. Unfortunately, the skill level of many web developers who use off-the-shelf platforms is insufficient to detect and recognize these flaws, much less fix them.
Here’s what you can do to make sure coding flaws don’t affect your search engine rankings:
Index Bloat – Ask your website marketing company to routinely check the size of the website index, so that any index bloat can be caught and corrected immediately, before it damages rankings. If index bloat is detected, any extraneous pages must be “de-indexed” or removed from the site altogether.
404 Errors – Use Google Search Console to routinely check the number of 404 errors in the site. Once detected, the 404 errors need to be fixed by replacing the incorrect URLs with the correct ones.
Load Speeds – Use the Google load speed tools regularly to check page load speeds and ensure the site is not getting bogged down with excess code. The biggest culprit for prolonged load speeds is too many plug-ins. If load speeds go up, the number of plug-ins needs to be streamlined.
If you would like a CEATUS coding expert to check your website for these three flaws, as well as others, please contact us.
Read Dr Evans’ full article from the May/June issue of Modern Aesthetics here.
