It is said that the only thing that is constant is change. And without doubt, the one change that is constant is technology, and the one technology that is changing at lightning speed is web technology!
Though change in technology is mostly for good, it comes at a price, plus the troubles of upgrading to a new one. The biggest worry for a business website owner isn’t just that, but it is the pace at which technology is changing. The scene boils down to two important questions – How to keep my website updated in an ever-changing scenario? And what’s the whole point in revamping a website, if it’s going to be obsolete again in a matter of few years? Though there isn’t an eternal solution to these problems, the smartest way out is to build a future-friendly website that can keep your business website current and cotemporary in the midst of these changes.
3 Tests that’ll tell you if your website is future-friendly
Scalability Test
In simple language, scalability is the ability to be scaled or enlarged to accommodate growth, both present and future. When it comes to web development that translates into the ability of your website to handle greater number of products, increased traffic and higher number of transactions. Though website scalability is affected by various factors, it is primarily a function of website architecture and framework. And yes, without doubt it has more to do with the architecture than anything else.
It may be true that your website is running fine now and that you have never ever bothered about what’s happening in the backend. But that doesn’t make it any lesser a chance that your website may not be obsolete. As a proactive, growing company the mantra is- don’t wait for your website to break! Go ahead and put your website to scalability test to know if it’s time for you to start thinking of a website redesign. Call your web consultant today, and find out if your website can scale up to handle an expansion. Say for example, if you are ecommerce portal has 100 product SKUs today, does your website have the capacity to handle 500 or 1000 more products in the next 2 years?
Every site is built on a framework matching the business requirement. Therefore the level and scope of website scalability needs to be understood on nature of business and type of products and services. While small and medium business websites, corporate websites and ecommerce portals scales fine on a CMS based framework like WordPress, heavy duty ecommerce portals like Amazon with over a million products would require an enterprise level framework or a scalable one of that sort to perform well. The moral- don’t just get your website built by anyone on any framework. Find what best suits your business and budgets and make your website future-ready!
Mobile-Friendly Test
Till recent times, the saying was that ‘the future is mobile’. Now that’s past! The future that many saw coming, has taken a fast-forward path to make it the present. The fact is – many businesses didn’t see it coming at this pace that they are ill prepared to face this paradigm shift in customer shopping preferences. In an era where the infectious smartphone culture is fast spreading even among the low-income groups, having a website doesn’t mean much, unless it’s easily accessible and available to customers on their mobile phones. However, the solution is not launching a mobile version of your website, as every year vast number of devices with varied screen resolutions are being launched into the market. What works well in one screen resolution may not work in another. The key to making your website future-ready is to build it using Responsive Web Design technology.
Responsive design is a forward-thinking technology, which has the capacity to function even on devices that are yet to be launched. Websites built using responsive technology are flexible enough to automatically respond to any screen resolution. It not only ensures same user-experience across various devices, but also takes away the pain of creating different versions of a website for different devices. With RWD, businesses can have one website that covers all devices.
To know if your website is mobile-friendly, resize your web browser to see for yourself if the content on your webpage gets adjusted automatically to the browser size. Alternatively, you could take the Mobile-Friendly Test offered by Google on-https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
SEO-Friendly Test
The crux of the problem is again similar- how to keep up with Google’s search engine algorithms that’s updated every now and then? To get this right, one need to first get the other two right, i.e. getting your website built on a scalable platform plus using responsive web design techniques.
If your site is built on a non-search friendly platform like Flash, then without any second thought get your website redesigned on a SEO-friendly and scalable framework. It is true that websites built with Flash are interactive and pleasing to eyes, but that wouldn’t be of much help as it will not be findable for search engines. How much ever awesome your Flash website looks, if search engines cannot correctly index your website, the end-result is that your visitors and prospects won’t be able to find your website. The same is the case of websites using HTML iFrames to embed interactive and multimedia content on the webpage. Google may not recognise the content in an iFrame, thereby increasing the chances for it to be missed out while indexing. In the context of SEO, the future-friendly rule is- if it’s not understandable for search engines, don’t use it!
Take a free SEO check-up to know how your website ranks in search engines. Here are few websites which gives you a basic diagnostic report.
http://seositecheckup.com/
http://www.alexa.com/
According to the Google, starting April 21, 2015, searches made via mobile devices will only fetch relevant mobile-friendly result pages. It means that how much ever you invest in SEO, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you could be losing out on a big chunk of prospective customers who use mobile phone as the primary device for online searches. That’s 50% of global mobile users, shows studies!
