Setting goals for your website can be a challenge. There are so many things you can focus on. Here, we outline 5 website goals that won’t require big investments of time or redevelopment.
If you’re redesigning your website, you may be wondering how to evaluate your site’s performance both before and after launch. Getting a baseline pre-launch and then comparing the new site a week or so post-launch can be a great way to measure success.
Whether you’re getting started on a website redesign project, or you’re looking to improve your existing website, reach for these 5 website goals.
Set OG Images for Every Page
If you share links to your website on social media, or if your audience shares links on social or in messaging apps, you’ll want to ensure you have OG images set up. These OG images, or Open Graph images, are the preview images displayed when a link to your website is shared on social media or messaging platforms.
Here’s an example of a link to our blog post that we posted on LinkedIn:
Here’s an example of how the same link displays when shared on Slack:
The OG image is the image you see displayed. This was not uploaded to LinkedIn or Slack; it was pulled directly from our website, along with the other metadata such as the Title, Description, Author, etc.
If you have a social media strategy that includes sharing to LinkedIn or other social media platforms, ensuring you have OG images set up will be especially important.
How To Set Up and Preview OG Images
If your website was built on the WordPress platform, we recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin to set up social preview images. Here is more information on how to create and set up social share preview images on your website.
If you have an existing website with many pages and blog posts, it’s a good idea to audit your site to see what OG images are currently set up and how they look on various social platforms. We built our tool Zelolab to do just that!
Zelolab’s free single-page social share preview tool can help you preview how your link will display when shared on Twitter/X, Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, and Google.
The full-site audit tool will show each and every page of your website, and its corresponding social share preview. You can see all pages of your website at-a-glance, then find and fix any missing or non-optimized OG images.
As you can see in this preview of Zelolab’s dashboard below, our website has OG images set for all pages in view. We can sort by preview type (Twitter/X is shown). Now, we can quickly see which may need improvement.
Focus on Engagement
Engagement is an important measure of success on your website and should be one of your website goals. Google Analytics’ latest update, GA4, is centered around Engagement metrics.
In GA4, Average Engagement Time measures how long your web page is in focus on a user’s screen. You can find this in Google Analytics under Reports > Life Cycle > Engagement > Engagement Overview.
So what is a good Average engagement time in GA4? We’ve found that 49 seconds is a good Average Engagement Time. Here’s more about how we determined this benchmark, along with other Engagement metrics in GA4 you should be keeping an eye on such as Engaged Sessions and Engagement Rate.
Make Sure Your Website is Accessible
Making a website accessible means making it better for everyone. Accessibility supports social inclusion and equal opportunity for people with disabilities as well as people with varying degrees of connectivity (rural, elderly, disadvantaged, developing, etc.). When a website’s content is available to everyone, website accessibility is achieved.
With website accessibility comes ADA compliance and improved SEO as added benefits!
It’s ideal to build accessibility into the visual design, user experience, and code of a website. But if you’re working with a website that was built prior to accessibility considerations, there are likely quick fixes you can make that won’t require a big investment.
Our ebook about website accessibility has tools, tips, and resources to help you ensure your website is accessible. In it, we outline how to create a more inclusive website that will result in protection from ADA compliance lawsuits and improved SEO.
Unfortunately, some lawyers and website agencies use fear tactics to scare business owners into settling in court or paying for website updates that may not be necessary. These methods only confuse what ADA compliance truly means. They do nothing to aid or improve website experiences for disabled users. Many accessibility plugins fall into the same category of being high-cost and low-value to end users.
If you’re building a new website, ensure accessibility is one of your website goals and that it will be built in to the design and code. If you’re optimizing an existing website, consider an accessibility audit. Making small improvements to the code can go a long way.
Find and Fix All Broken Links
Broken links are links from one webpage to another that no longer work. These could be broken internal links—where your webpage links to another page of your website that was deleted. Or, they might be external links—where you link to a different website that has a page that no longer exists.
Having internal or external links on your website that don’t work create a bad user experience and negatively affect your SEO. Finding and fixing broken links on your website should be one of your website goals. It is a time consuming process, especially if you have many pages. Luckily, there are tools that can find these broken links more easily.
Our tool Zelolab has a free tool called Audit Page Links that you can use to check for broken links on a single webpage.
The full-site audit tool will show each and every page of your website, along with the number of links found. You can see all pages of your website at-a-glance, then find and fix any broken links.
As you can see in th preview of Zelolab’s dashboard below, you can sort your entire website’s pages by the number of broken links. Here you can see 4 numbers: Total Number of Links, Number of Internal Links, Number of External Links, and how many have an Error.
We recommend fixing all broken links as soon as possible after your first audit. Then, check back at regular intervals to ensure no additional links have broken. If your website links to many external websites, a weekly check at the minimum will be important.
Here are additional tools you can use to find broken links on your website.
Make Sure Your Website Loads Fast
Page speed is a factor Google uses when determining search rankings and should be at the top of your website goals list. Of course, the faster the better! Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a go-to tool for checking your page speed.
Here’s a screenshot of their Report for our website:
Things look good for Desktop, with a Performance score of 93.
Page speed scores in Lighthouse can be confusing, and checking one page at a time would be time consuming or near-impossible for a website with many pages.
Zelolab’s Page Speed Audit combines Google Lighthouse’s scores (desktop and mobile) to show them at-a-glance. You can view Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO scores in one simple view.
Here’s a preview showing how you can see all your website’s pages in Zelolab’s full-site dashboard and sort your pages by speed scores. There are 10 scores shown—5 for mobile, and 5 for desktop including: SEO, Performance, Accessibility, Best Practicies, and the Average of these scores. You can sort by the Average. From here, you can address pages that have lower scores, and continue to track scores as you update pages.
Conclusion
Overall, your website should be shareable, engaging, accessible, in working order, and fast. Targeting these 5 goals will result in a great user experience that will ultimately lead to more conversions and greater success.