1. Are you designing for your visitor, or for yourself?

UX (user experience) isn’t developer jargon. It's the most important thing to get right on any website. But too many sites are designed around an organization’s internal structure.  A website is not an org chart. Your visitors don’t need to know or care about your departmental structure.

They know what they're looking for, and they'll decide in about thirty seconds whether your site is going to help them find it. If the answer is no, they leave.

Everything on your site should be evaluated through one lens: does this serve the person on the other end of the screen?

2. Have you looked at your site on a phone lately?

Around 60% of global web traffic now comes from mobile devices. On some platforms it's higher. Which means the version of your site most people see is the one that renders on a 6-inch screen.

That has implications for everything: font size, button size, how much text you put on a page, whether your navigation actually works with a thumb instead of a cursor, and whether the video you embedded as a hero element loads in two seconds or twenty, or is partially cut off on a phone screen.

If you haven't looked at your site on a phone recently, do it today.

3. Can visitors find what they need in two clicks?

Menus that try to include everything end up helping no one. If a visitor has to make three or four decisions just to get to the thing they came for, most of them won't make it.

Audit your navigation. Consolidate similar content. Bury the stuff that only matters to you internally. Elevate the things your visitors actually need. A good rule of thumb: if you can't get to any important page in two clicks from the homepage, your site has a structure problem.

4. Does every page work as a front door?

Organic search accounts for over half of all website traffic. That means the majority of your visitors arrive through Google, a link someone shared, or a referral from another site. Increasingly, they are asking AI to help them find you. They land on a blog post, a program page, or a buried service description more often than landing on your homepage.

The question to ask about every page on your site is: if this were the first thing someone saw, would they know who you are, what you do, and what to do next? If the answer is no, the page isn't finished.

5. When did you last actually check?

Broken links. Outdated information. Programs that no longer exist. Staff pages for people who left two years ago. Event listings for things that happened in 2022.

Most organizations publish but never tidy up. A website is not a brochure or a filing cabinet. It requires maintenance.

Track your analytics. See what people are actually visiting and what they're bouncing off of. Fix what's broken. Archive what's stale. Update what's changed.

Your site is often the first impression someone gets of your organization. Make sure it's the one you'd want them to have.

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