I often see ‘Page Not Found’ errors. Is that a
maintenance issue, as well?
Let’s say you have a page about a discontinued product and
as part of the maintenance you remove that page. You may not realize that there
are other links around that point back to that page. So now, when visitors
click on one of those they now get a ‘Page Not Found’ error message in place of
the missing page.
Even if your site has not changed at all, you may still have
bad links. Your website may have links that point to pages on other people’s
sites. If one of those other sites changes the location of a page, image or
file that you are linking to from your page, you will have an instant bad link.
Here are some of the ways a link can be bad:
- Links
pointing to sites that cannot be reached (no such site) - Links
pointing to valid sites but with pages that cannot be reached - Links
pointing to pages that are found but never load (timeout) - Links
that point to pages that are found but are restricted by security
That’s why it’s important to check out the integrity of your
site’s links on a regular basis. If your site is small, you can do this by
opening your home page and following every link to ensure they are all working
as expected. For larger sites, manually checking can be tedious and error prone
so it’s best to use some type of automated tool. Google’s free online Webmaster
Tools are a good starting point. One of those tools is a site checker that
crawls through your site to identify any broken links.
Some pages seem to take a long time to load. Why is that?
We’ve all experienced frustratingly slow websites — so you
already know what a turn-off that is for your clients and prospects. Why lose
business unnecessarily because of slowness that can be easily remedied?
There are many reasons why your site may be slow to load.
The most common include:
- Bloated
flash animations - Improperly
scaled image files - Overloaded
Web server - Improperly
indexed database - Poorly
designed Web application - Internet
or host site network congestion
Some of these are intrinsic to your site design and static.
Others are dependent on server load, visitor traffic or network bandwidth and
change over time. Unless you are monitoring your site’s performance, you will
not be aware of these issues until it has already impacted your business. Here
at BlueWave Computing, we use specialized Web monitoring tools to measure site
responsiveness at five-minute intervals throughout the day. We can also measure
how long it takes each individual object on each page to load. That allows us
to find the bottlenecks and optimize the page load times.
How important is security on the website?
Every site connected to the Internet is prone to malicious
attacks. Whether hackers are looking to steal data, transmit viruses to your
visitors or just share their pirated videos with the world, you want to keep
them off your server. To do that, have a qualified professional regularly
review the site’s security settings and check the Web logs to ensure only authorized
areas and data on your site are being accessed.
By instituting a routine maintenance procedure that
incorporates these items, you’ll keep your site working like new and your
clients, prospects and other visitors will come away with the best possible
impression of your site and, hence, your company.
Steven Vicinanza, Ph.D., is CEO of BlueWave Computing LLC.
For more information, visit www.bluewave-computing.com.