What makes for a healthy website :

Typically when talking about health, even if not in the literal sense, people think of drastic problems that we cannot overlook. And while website health isn’t exactly like that, it’s a lot similar. The things that count as problems with your website’s health are things you can go without if you just want to have the site on, but are also things which will make your site quite less efficient in many areas. That’s why people recommend checking for these basic problems.

The efficiency of a certain website can be measured by many parameters, all of which have to do with the site’s ease of use and also with its parameters with regard to search engines. So if one wanted, one could define website health as a set of characteristics concerning usability and search engine optimization (SEO).

But what exactly are those things ?

What makes a website healthy or not ?

As mentioned above, usability is crucial to declaring your website healthy. Let’s take a look at the most common things :

• Does your site load quicklyenough ? Most people would be bored out of their skull if they had to wait for more than a minute for your website to load, and lots of them would even close it when forced to wait for so long. In that regard, making your website or blog load faster is of paramount importance.
• Is it W3C validated ? Standards compliant ? Those are also important things. In the past , people had to design their website to work under a certain browser better than under others, and as you can probably imagine, that caused lots of problems. Nowadays, most popular and good browsers are standards compliant, but so has to be your website, in order to display properly. Having a validated source code is a necessity, and you can guarantee that by using standards compliant software and plugins (as is WordPress for example)
• Does your site rely on Java applets/ Flash / Silverlight ? Any specific applications that can make it impossible to run on a slower machine ? These things are all fine in moderation, but if your entire site is in Flash, that means users who can’t display Flash properly won’t be able to even see it. This is a problem of usability as well as SEO as we will mention later. But in general ,experts recommend using flash only for things you can go without, or secondary features, but not as a tool to develop your webpage in general

On to the SEO issues, we have lots more to add. In general, you can go without those, but if you want your site to be more easily found by search engines, you might want to read them carefully and consider checking several things are in place. So the list goes on like this :

• Have you filled in the meta information for your site ? Meta information is contained in alt and meta; tags inside your code, and it contains descriptions which search engines take into account when indexing your website. For example , it can contain keywords by which you want your site to be more easily found.
• Does your site have a proper structure ? Filling in the <title> tag for each page is very important , SEO-wise, as is the use of headings tags to keep a good structure of your content. Be sure to take that into account for the SEO health of your website.
• Does your site use images/non-text information extensively ? For example, if your menu or navigation is made with images, it’s practically meaningless to the search engine crawler bots. Consider going to a text stylized with CSS menu. Flash also means nothing to web crawlers, so keep that in mind.
• Have you considered using sitemaps ? Sitemaps are very good for telling the search engine exactly what your site comprises of. They guarantee better and faster indexing.

These are, in essence, the most important things to having a healthy site. You can check them manually, or use some of the many pieces of software designed particularly for that purpose. Some of them can even be found in website form. So don’t fear to check your website, and be sure to mend any mistakes found. Good luck!