Best Practice Tips

Best practices for getting started when managing/editing your website include starting small and working towards more complex criteria. SiteImprove will help highlight issues and create reports for where your website needs improvement.

1. Start with the basics – Broken Links

Broken links negatively affect user perception of your website. Broken links most often occur because either the URL was entered incorrectly when the link was created, or the link destination has moved or no longer exists. There should be no broken links on your website.

2. 150 characters or less for metadata.

Keep it short. Metadata includes things like alt descriptions, summaries, captions, and other descriptive text. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page. Ideally, meta descriptions should be no more than 150 characters, or else you risk important information being cut off or being too long to be useful.

3. Misspellings

A misspelling can have a devastating effect on a visitors experience with a website, and therefore the image of the organization behind the website. There should be no misspellings on your website.

4. Keep it small

A simple thing to overlook when adding documents and media files to a website is their size. As a general rule of thumb, documents and files should not be bigger than 5MB otherwise they will cause a range of annoying problems for the user. They will slow the speed of your site, cause problems if you have a responsive design and put a serious dent in mobile users data plans.

5. Link it right

Writing descriptive link text is important for accessible websites. Ideally, link text should describe the destination even when taken out of the context of a paragraph it may appear in. This is why using ‘read more’ or ‘click here’ for link text should be avoided. The small change of writing descriptive link text will make a big difference to a number of users.

6. Testing 1, 2, 3

Use Siteimprove to help in assisting and finding accessibility issues such as broken links, misspellings, and WCAG 2.0 Accessibility testing.