Episode 17: Tips For Small Business Owners: Why You Need To Use This Free Tool to Assess Your Website’s Performance
How will you know if you’ve designed your website well? How can you check if your website is performing at its full potential? In this short tip episode, Fiona shares how HubSpot’s Website Grader helped her assess how her website, mydailybusinesscoach.com, is doing based on performance SEO, mobile optimisation and security. Listen as she shares the advantages of using the website grader to evaluate your website.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction [0:59]
HubSpot [1:45]
Website Grader [2:20]
Why This Tool is Helpful [3:57]
#1 - User Friendly [4:12]
#2 - Free Tool [4:58]
#3 - Gives Proper Insights and Guidance [5:30]
#4 - Check Other URLs
#5 - Provide solutions
Why You Need To Constantly Use This Tool [10:16]
Conclusion [12:43]
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 17 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast.
Today, we are talking tips as it's a tip episode. So these tip episodes that come out every single week, every Tuesday, and it's a short, sharp episode, all about a tip, tool or a tactic that can help you with your small business.
But before we get into today’s episode I just wanted to give a massive shout out to small business owners in Melbourne, where I’m from. We have just been put on hard lockdown which means we have curfews and we are only to leave the house for 1 hour max and we are restricted by a 5k radius. Now, I know we have to do this but I wanted to send my thoughts, love and prayers to those of you who are feeling really deflated and defeated right now. These are tough times, so please make sure you are being kind to yourself first and foremost. Small business can be challenging anytime, let alone right now. And if you are lucky enough to be operating outside of Melbourne or in a country or part of a country that’s not in lockdown, please take the time to check in on your friends or family or just people you know off IG who are in lockdown. A small “how are you?” or “thinking of you” goes along way.
So I'm just going to get stuck right in today. Don't you love that? I hate when I listen to podcasts and there's like 15 or 20 minutes of them just rambling before they get to the point. Anyway, this is a tip episode, so definitely not the place to do that. Yeah, like I said, I'm just gonna get stuck right in with this tool because I think it's one that's super helpful to anyone who has a website. And I'm betting that as a small business owner, you have a website, as does, you know, most small business owners on the planet. All right, let's get into it, shall we?
So today's tool is from HubSpot and whether you love HubSpot or you hate them, they do some pretty nifty stuff and a lot of it is free. And if you don't know what I'm talking about or who I am talking about, HubSpot is an American software company. I guess you could call it that. I think it's an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales and customer service. I just read that off Wikipedia. That's really what HubSpot is. And they bring in around six hundred seventy five million US dollars a year. So they're not doing too badly, but they have a whole lot of paid products.
And today, I'm not going to talk about HubSpot or their pay products. I am going to just talk about one of their free tools. So what is it? The tool I'm going to talk about is HubSpot Website Grader. Now, the URL for this will, of course, be in the show notes and you can grab them at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/17 because we're at episode 17. But if you want to play along at home and you want to check this out while you're listening to this, I want to cheque out the tool. You can simply google Website Grader or the URL is website.grader.com.
So let's get stuck in, as the name suggests, Website Grader grades your website. So it literally scans your website and it runs it through their software in seconds to leave you with a score out of 100 for things like there's lots of stuff that I tell you. But basically they class it under four categories. One is performance. One is SEO. So if you don't know what it stands for, it's search engine optimisation. So when people search things like Google or Bing, you know, where do you rank? How do you come up? How do people find you? Do they find the right content? All that. Mobile optimisation and security. So those four are, again, performance SEO, mobile optimisation and security. So it looks at things like how fast your images load, how optimised for searches your website. How does your Website appear and work when it's viewed from a mobile device or tablet? And lastly, how secure is your website? And obviously that is particularly important if you're like me and you sell things directly from your website. But really it should just be important for every Web site.
So let's talk about why I like this tool. I mean, it is not the only one out there. There are plenty like this. But I actually really like website grader and I like it for many reasons. But I'm going to talk you through five of those. So number one, it is super user friendly. I mean, you don't need to really do anything magical. You literally, you know, you don't need to sign up. You don't need to join anything. You can literally input your you are all into the landing page and your email address. And I actually have a separate email account. I might do a tip episode on that. I have a separate email account I set up. So whenever I'm doing stuff like this and it's random and I don't really want to be on an email list, I put in that random email account that I've made up. So on website grader put in the URL, you put your email address, I put in my random email address and within seconds it'll spit out a score out of 100. So I like that there's no hefty sign-up process and you can just get straight in there. The second thing I like about it is it's free. You know, that is always a good thing, especially for small business owners and solo operators when you're trying to look at your expenses. It's free and it's great because especially if you want to search, multiple websites are not just your own. So some of these tools that I've seen, they're great, but they put a limit. So they're like, oh, you can have three searches for free before you have to pay or X amount of searches per month before you have to pay. So as far as I know, and I could be wrong here and they might have updated this recently, but I've been using this for many years. And as far as I know, there isn't a limit on searches. So the third thing I like about this is that it shows you exactly where you are not optimising your website. So, for example, under the topic of performance, it will give you scores and information on everything from your image sizes. So sort of the sizes of like video and photos and other rich media that you're using through to page loading times and page requests. And likewise, under Mobile, it will tell you whether you have legible text size for mobile viewing and other things like whether it's responsive, which means that the design and the usability of a website adapts. Whether someone is on an iPad or iPhone or desktop computer, it adapts to their screen size. And you'll see sometimes I see it quite often with e-commerce brands where I might, you know, like something on Instagram, tap through the bio tap to buy. And I am suddenly brought to their website and either which pet peeve? They have a pop up, which takes up basically the whole screen of my iPhone. And I can't find the little X to get out of there because it hasn't been mobile optimised or they have it just it's really clunky and you can't actually do anything on a mobile. So it's really great, that website grader gives you information about how responsive and how, you know, legible and how usable, really your Web site is from a mobile or an iPad. So it really shows you what's wrong. And it uses language that anyone can understand. So I have been in you know, I've worked in websites and digital marketing and that for a long time, but I'm still not a coder. And sometimes I find with some of these Websites, they are giving you language that you can't actually understand unless you are a website developer. But website grader is not like that. Just use layman's terms and it's really easy to understand. So that's number three. The fourth reason I really like it, and I hinted on this before when I said that it's free, is that you can check other URLs. So if you're in a super competitive industry or you have websites that you look at and you think are doing really well and you wonder how yours compares, you can plug that other websites are not your business, somebody else's into website grader. And you can have a look around at what's working or not working for them. So if you're say, for instance, you plug it into website Grider and you get all this feedback that your images are really slow or your page loading time or things like that. And you might be like, well, so-and-so is website. You know, they have way more images than me or way more rich media or whatever. You could put theirs in and have a look. And it might be that they're embedding things in a different way. It could be that they're actually resizing their images. And you can find those things usually by right clicking on the image and then having a look at the image source info, which is a whole other topic. But I love that you can check other URLs because this can come in really handy. Like I said, just having a look at kind of competitors, but it also can come in handy when you are looking to do a refresh on your website or you're looking at what works or doesn't work in your industry or just to get an idea of how to fix certain things. So that's number four. You can check about your URLs. Number five, is it provide solutions. So I love the whole solutions focused mindset type of thing. And I think that, you know, a lot of these places, a lot of people in life can just provide a whole lot of problems without giving you solutions. If you've ever managed a team, you'll often have somebody in your team who is a problem pronouncer it and they will tell you all the problems. But when you say so, what's the solution? You know, they're less likely to come forward. Anyway, I digress. Number five, website grader provide solutions so it doesn't just tell you what's wrong with your website. It actually provides when you scroll down on your kind of answer page where it gives you the score out of one hundred. When you scroll down, it gives you a full list of what to fix or even just where to start to fix these things. So if you're knowledgeable about the back end of your website, if you built it yourself, you can use this list as a checklist to work through, perhaps even inputting each of the things that they suggest into an Asana board or Trello board to tick off. And if you don't know how to fix your website or you don't want to leave that to a professional. This list is a great thing to pass on to a web developer or whoever it is that does the back end of your Web site, or even if you don't have somebody that does that and you say solo operator, you might want to then pay someone to come in and just fix a few of these things for you. And it's really good to have this list because you can then provide that as a brief to the website developer and they can in return be able to quote you based on the things that website grader has said you need to fix.
So that is five quick reasons as to why a website grader might be something that you want to check out and use in your small business. But I should add as well that you want to come back to this tool every few months or, you know, every so often, more frequently, less frequently, depending on all sorts of things about your website. But recently with this podcast and with a few other things that have been happening on my website, mydailybusinesscoach.com, we have slipped in the grade that website grader has given us. So I've been using this tool for a few years now, like I said, and usually mydailybusinesscoach.com was sitting in the 90 to 95 mark. So what's that? It's been a while since I was in high school, but I think that's like an A right or an A plus even, which is amazing. You know, really great website. But recently, because my VA and I have been doing a bit of loading to the site, you know, we're putting very long blog posts in for every episode, every episode show notes are at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast. There's a lot of information there. Some of those will have video content, some will have downloadable, some will have other rich media images. We're not always resizing properly. And, you know, I held my hand up to that. We're not doing that as well as we could be. And there's a few other things. So adding videos and like I said, other stuff. But we have actually slipped down to what I think would be classed as a C or even a C minus. So like gasp. But that is because we haven't been looking at this stuff closely enough as we have expanded other parts of the business.
So it's definitely something that you want to put into your calendar. Make sure that you are definitely checking this stuff on a regular basis. Maybe not just with website grader but, you know, other tools and platforms that you use. So we're definitely going to look up that mark to get back up into the B's and A's and feel good about ourselves as a website. But really, you want to be making sure that whatever way you do your analytics and reviews of things like a website, that it's not just set and forget, it's something that you want to mark in to cheque every so often. Now, of course, there are other ways to cheque this, such as some of the tools that Google offers and others. But it's definitely worth adding website grader to the mix just because it is so user friendly. You don't have to understand a whole lot about, you know, say, for instance, with Google Analytics, some people can be put off with that if they don't understand it. This one, I feel like anyone could understand what it spits out.
So that is it for today's tip episode, like I said. Short and sharp. Please make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss out on any other quick tips like this, as well as my longer coaching episodes and my interviews with small business owners across the globe. The My Daily Business Coach podcast comes out twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Australian Eastern Standard Time. And if you find it useful, I would love, love, love if you could please share this with your small business friends shared on social media. Please don't forget to tag us at my daily business coach. And if you feel up for it, I would love it if you could provide a review on iTunes that just make sure that other small business owners can find tips like this and help improve the way that they run their small business. So remember, as always, the show notes, including a full transcript of this episode and all the links mentioned within can be found at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/17. See you next time.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram - @mydailybusinesscoach.
Please make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss out on any other quick tips like this
If you find it useful, I would love, love, love if you could please share this with your small business friends shared on social media.
And if you feel up for it, I would love it if you could provide a review on iTunes
If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram - @mydailybusinesscoach.
