Is Your Website Working Properly? Here’s How To Check.

How do you check if your breeder website is actually working? A lot of breeders have invested time and money into producing this beautiful website for their breeding. And yet, you can almost hear the crickets. Despite being lovely to look at, there are no puppy inquiries coming in from that website and it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

So, if you’re not sure whether your website’s actually working and performing for you or not, then here’s how to check.

Search for Yourself!

The very first thing to do is to go into Google and type in your breed. It might be Airedale and then the word puppies, and then for sale, or just Airedale puppies, and then your location. So for me, it would be Airedale puppies Perth, or Airedale puppies WA, as I am in Western Australia, or Airedale puppies for sale WA.

It shouldn’t make any difference very much, but just do that for your breed and your location, and then see whether your website or your Facebook page actually appears on the first, second, or third pages of Google.

To be honest, if it doesn’t appear on the first page of Google, it’s probably not going to get hardly any traffic at all.

You at least want it on the second page, but first page is what you should be aiming for. Because the actual number of clicks goes down dramatically when you don’t appear until the second page.

So anyway, have a look and see, and then if you don’t see yourself in the first few pages, then you know your website’s not working at all.

So, let me tell you how to troubleshoot, to identify what the problem might be.

Google and the User Experience

The first things you need to check are factors valued by Google when it ranks websites as to whether they should put them higher in the search engine results or not. They’re all things related to the user experience, to the experience of the visitor. And, I’ve got a little visitor here. Hey, Buttons, come say hi. This is Buttons. She just had puppies a week ago. Hey Buttons… Okay.

So yes, the user experience is what Google wants to optimize. It will penalize websites which don’t give people a good user experience.

Is it fast?

One of the things that fall into the category of user experience is how fast the website actually loads.

You might have beautiful photographs of your dogs, for example, but if they’re all really high resolution, large size images, that’s going to slow down your loading of your page on your website.

Google will penalize you for that because, if a page takes too long to load, what do we do as visitors? We tend to click out, don’t we? We’re not going to hang around for 13 seconds, waiting for that website page to load.

So, you want to make sure and you can check that, and there is a tool for that. And, I’m going to put the link to it, I’m going to write it up here, so you can see it on this video. But, it’s a free Google tool, and all you do is have to put in your URL, which is the actual address on the top bar of your website, your actual address like HTTP, blah, blah. Www. Etc. So, you can just put that in there, wait a few minutes, and then it’ll give you a result to tell you how fast that your website’s loading.

So obviously, you want it to be loading quickly. And if it doesn’t, then you might need to go back and use lower resolution images on your website.

Is it secure?

The second thing that you need to check is whether or not your website has a security token. What do I mean by that is when you’re looking at the website URL, instead of HTTP, it should be HTTPS. And what that means is that it’s been encrypted, so that hackers can’t just go in there and steal people’s information that they happen to enter into your website, like credit card details and things like that.

Now, you’ve probably had this happen to you where you’ve gone to go to a website, and then your browser, whether it be Chrome or Firefox Mozilla, whatever has said, “Hey, this is not safe, we’re not going to let you go there because it’s not a safe site.”

Well, if you had a security token on the website, then you would be considered safe, and Google would actually give you precedence in the search results because you’re safe. And of course, if you weren’t safe, they would say, “Nah, we’re not serving that page up in the search engine results.” Okay, so check that.

Unfortunately, if you didn’t know about that before you created your website, then it could cost you a lot to actually get that. So, that’s a problem and something that you need to think about before you choose your hosting, because it comes free with a lot of hosts, but others might charge you $70 a month for the privilege of having a secure site. So yeah, hopefully you’ve been lucky there, because most of us wouldn’t even know what to do about something like that.

Hopefully you’ve ticked both those boxes.

Is it mobile friendly?

The other thing that you need to check, which we also have a Google tool for, is how mobile friendly is your website.

Some website themes unfortunately are not what we call mobile responsive. The more modern themes that you can have for your website actually will change their orientation depending on whether you’re looking at it from, say your mobile phone, or whether you’ve got a little iPad that you’re looking at, or whether you’ve got a full big screen personal computer.

So, they’re responsive and they can change appearance depending on the hardware we’re using to look at it them. Unfortunately, if your website’s under a theme that’s not mobile responsive, then it’s not going to look very good on small devices. Google will sense that and will say, “Oh, well, let’s not dish it up to people who are doing the search, because it’s not responsive.”

So, they also luckily have a tool where you can check to see how responsive your website is, and again, I’ll put the URL up here for you, so you can go there and again, put in your website address so that you can actually see how responsive your theme is. To fix that, you’d have to talk to your developer.

I know not all of the free and cheap website, drag and drop programs like Weebly and Wix are mobile responsive. So, if you’re already in one of those, you might have to pay a premium to actually get that extra feature, or you might have to consider getting out of those altogether and starting again.

If you have a lot of traffic already on your website and it’s doing really well, thank you very much, I would suggest you just leave it there. But, if you’re not getting any traffic anyway, I would really strongly urge you to start again and do it properly this time.

It’s not rocket science. It’s very, very inexpensive to do a website properly. But, if you don’t know what to do, obviously you’re going to be a little bit at the mercy of developers and people offering websites services, and you won’t even know whether or not you’re getting a good deal.

So, if you want to know a bit more information, I’ve written an article about this and you can find it below. There’s a link to it and have a look up. I did a review of all the main website services and options for breeders. And, I hope that you find that helpful.