Your website may be broken and you don’t even know it

So you’ve looked at your website and it works, that’s fantastic news it’s ready for the public…

Well, maybe not; one of the trickiest parts of being a web developer is getting a website to function properly on every computer, web browser, mobile phone and tablet.

Although sector-specific, it’s estimated that half of web traffic is from mobile phones and tablets, so if your website isn’t correctly optimised, then potentially 50% of your customers will see a website that appears broken.

What if you export worldwide? Over one in five people in China user Internet Explorer 6 which was superseded back in 2006. If they look at your website it will more than likely appear broken.

Now consider users with smaller monitors, older or non-standard web browsers, or those who have disabled functionality due to their disabilities or preferences. Although each may represent a small section of your audience, combined that’s potentially a lot of lost customers!

How much would you pay for 10% more custom? 20% more? What about 50% more?

Quite a lot I’m sure! But what if you could achieve the same results by ensuring that 10, 20 or 50% of your users aren’t lost due to a broken website? Not broken as you look at it remember, but broken as they look at it on their device.

Don’t think that it’s just smaller companies that get it wrong either. Santander has a small bug displaying the tablet version of their to display incorrectly (a very easy fix) and their website has limited functionality for users with Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, effectively only 2.3% ^[1], a small percentage, but that equates to 598,000 of their customers in the UK alone! ^[2]

 

So what can you do?

Well testing is the obvious answer; use a variety of computers, mobile phones and tablets, all of different ages and with different setups, and look at your website and see if it all works efficiently.

The issue is that there are hundreds of devices with thousands of potential setups, so although you can do this, it is very time consuming.

This is where we come in; we’re web designers in Salisbury and we offer a website testing service where we’ll look at your website, and test the areas that we think will be of concern. If your website is broken, we’ll not only tell you why, but tell you how important it is likely to be for your business and sector.

We offer this as a free service, as well as a full in-depth report.

If you’d like to know more, please feel free to contact our web designers, in the meantime whenever you pass a friend’s computer, mobile or tablet, ask if you can borrow it and have a look at your own website. You may be surprised!

 

 

^{[1] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp
[2] http://www.santander.com/csgs/Satellite/CFWCSancomQP01/en_GB/Corporate/The-United-Kingdom.html}