126. Is Your Website Healthy? A Technical Checkup for School Marketers

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[00:00:00] Welcome to Mindful School Marketing, your go-to podcast for personal and professional growth. We’re school marketers, business owners, and moms passionate about connecting other school professionals with tools and strategies for success. We love solving problems, exploring new ideas, and thinking outside the box.

Let’s transform your school and life starting right now.

Tara: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing. I’m Tara Clays. 

Aubrey: And I’m Aubrey Burch. 

Tara: Today we are gonna be starting something new. We’re introducing a few a series, I guess we can call it, some short actionable content. These are quick little episodes that you can just digest really quickly with a topic that Aubrey and I are gonna cover based on our experience and what we think and, and have heard that you guys wanna hear about.

Aubrey: Absolutely. And we’re kicking off this series, uh, by talking about school websites with Tara. So before we dive in though, Tara you’re not just a school marketer talking about websites. In theory, you actually build and [00:01:00] maintain them. Can you tell our listeners who don’t perhaps know a bit about your background, a little bit more about yourself?

Tara: Sure. Yeah. So my company design, TLC, is a web design agency based in Arlington, Virginia. And I have been developing websites for over 15 years and been a marketer for, gosh, about 30 now. So, uh, for the last. Many years our focus has been exclusively on school websites and education focused nonprofits.

So it’s, it’s what we would call our niche and, um, we love it. We love working with schools, we work with WordPress, but I consider myself to be a specialist with a lot of knowledge about overall website performance and accessibility, user experience, and best practices. If you know me, you know, I love to talk about this kind of stuff, um, and all of this specifically for school websites and what school websites need.

Aubrey: Absolutely. And I’ve learned so much from you along the way, Tara. So yay, excited for this chat today. So [00:02:00] without further ado, let’s, uh, kick it off with this question. How to know if your website is actually working the way it should, not just looking good on the surface. This is a great one. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

Tara: I mean, we have schools come to us who say like, I really don’t know if my website is a mess or not. They may be having trouble on the backend with it. They just aren’t sure if it needs to be updated, if it’s, you know, if it looks okay, but also if it functions okay. So a lot of people just don’t even know where to start and understanding that.

And I think about it kind of like getting an annual checkup. Like when you go to your doctor maybe once a year and you get your blood work done, and I check everything out and you can look at, you know, in your portal now, you can look at all those numbers and, um, it’ll show you maybe if something’s high or low, but you don’t really know.

You don’t really understand what those things are. And if. There something to worry about or not worry about, so your doctor will translate it for you. So that’s what I’m gonna try to do today is talk about these different kinds of tests that you may get reports [00:03:00] on. You may get things from Google Search Console, from Google about your website and not know if it’s something to worry about.

We get emails about that all the time. So kind of talking about what are the red alert things that you need to fix immediately and what are things that really aren’t as important or you don’t have to really stress out about. 

Aubrey: So today we’re helping schools cut through all that noise, right? ’cause you’re getting all bombarded with all this information and know what to actually pay attention to from a technical performance standpoint.

So I, I’m super excited. Tara, if you, let’s just dive right in. If a school could only check a few things to know their website is technically healthy, what would those be? 

Tara: So website speed is something that people don’t really think about necessarily because you might be on a really fast, you know, a really fast router.

You may have really good service but not everybody has that. And also because you may visit a website, often your website has cached the results. It’s saved the way that your website looks and how it’s supposed to [00:04:00] load. And so you may not be getting an accurate representation of how fast or slow your website loads.

So that’s. Website load speed is super important. Lots of studies have come out, and this is probably gonna change soon, but they say, Google says that your website should load in under three seconds. So you can use a tool like GT Metrics or Google has its own free tool, the web vitals, Google’s Lightspeed test.

So, um, you can check or lighthouse test, you can check that yourself and it will give you a few different metrics within that. It will tell you how. Fast, your website loads how? With the largest content, full paint. That means how long it takes for most of your website homepage or whatever page you’re testing to load.

And then a cumulative layout shift is about how much things may move. So if you have a slider or a video, you may see the CLS cumulative layout. Shift number may, may not be scoring well. Um, and that it’s often the case [00:05:00] with slider as we see that. So you wanna try to just minimize. The amount of slides that you have and the um, and just the amount of things happening on your website.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have some cool interactivity, but if you see your score low, that’s probably why. So I recommend using Google Page Speed Insights, or, or Google Search Console also has a web vitals report. So if your website is connected to Google Analytics, you probably are connected to Google Search Console or you can easily do that.

And that will give you some reports and I’ll talk more about some of those reports later. But really it’s important that your website loads well just. From a user experience standpoint, but also you will get deprioritized in search rankings and visitors won’t stay on your site. So you wanna make sure that your website loads quickly.

That’s really important. The second thing that you wanna test is of course, that your website loads. Mobile and loads quickly on mobile, but also that it looks good on mobile, that it is mobile responsive, meaning that your [00:06:00] website reorients the content to fit well on all different screen sizes.

Google has a mobile friendly test, or you can just look on your own phone to see this as well. So you wanna make sure that the navigation is usable on your website, that the colors are, you know. It might change on, on your mobile version versus the color that your navigation is on your desktop. So you wanna make sure that your, uh, that your everything’s working on the phone as well.

And then test the website speed, which the Google test will tell you if your website loads quickly on mobile. And I will tell you it is a lot harder to get your website to load fast on mobile than it is to get it to load fast on desktop.

And then the last thing that I will talk about that’s important is broken links. So we see this a lot, especially if your website’s been around for a while and you have blog or news content where the, you’ve got links to news articles that may not be there anymore. But also, if you’ve deleted pages on your site, you’re gonna find.

You have [00:07:00] broken links, and you probably have seen those 4 0 4 pages pop up when you’ve gone to other websites, and it can be frustrating, but also this is going to also impact your Google search, uh, results. And you can get a report from a Google search console that will tell you if you have broken links, it will identify for you where they are.

Uh, and, and so you want to look at that report if you get a report saying that you have broken links. But you can also test it yourself. There’s a free broken link checker. If you just put into Google Broken Link Checker, you can put your URL in there and it will tell you, um, which pages are broken, uh, where the sources, where it’s found, where the broken links are found.

So you wanna try to fix those. And if you have hundreds of them, which we have seen websites that have that. You know, you can download them. Some tools will let you. Like a Screaming Frog is a tool that we use. It’s a fun name, um, that crawls your site and you can download the broken links there and put them into a spreadsheet and just kind of work on them over time.

Aubrey: I. That is, first of all, I will have to say that these are things that I hear schools [00:08:00] talk about all the time, Tara. So I’m so grateful that you’re addressing those. Um, is there anything else that you can think of for this? I mean, we just talked about broken links. Yeah. What about, what, is there a final, um, piece to that, that, 

Tara: yeah, so well, so, um, an SSL is a secure socket layer That is when you get it.

Error saying that your site is insecure. So you’ve probably seen that on sites and hopefully by now, this has been a requirement for long enough. Most website providers, website hosts do provide this for you, but you may also see that you have, if you have some things that are loaded that are not secure, your website may have this special certificate for, and this is security, I should say, not to keep your site from getting hacked, but it per it.

Is providing a secure connection for people who are putting content into your website. So if you have a contact form, those types of things, you need to have this SSL to protect the content that’s being transferred from a user to [00:09:00] your website. And you may also have content on your site, like an image or something that’s been loaded previously without a secure connection.

And that will show up as mixed content errors on your site. So if you’re seeing one page that has that little triangle warning sign, that means there’s something on that page. It might not be that your whole site is missing their certificate, but there’s something on that page that needs to be reloaded or needs to be.

Um. Updated with the secure with securely. 

Aubrey: Yeah. And I will say as a visitor, I just tried to fill out flag football forms and I ended up on a not secure and I was like, I’m so hesitant 

Tara: about Yeah, you’re not gonna do it. 

Aubrey: Right. Yeah. So, so if I, I mean it’s flag football, like if I’m thinking about that other flag football parents are probably thinking much seriously, more serious about that 

Tara: with 

Aubrey: Google websites.

Thanks Tara. And I know for those of you who are. Probably may be a little overwhelmed, but all the, the things that Tara Tara’s got you. She’s gonna hook you up with all these links and stuff like that for all [00:10:00] these wonderful tools 

Tara: that you use. Yes. They will be in the show notes. 

Aubrey: Yeah. So she’s got you on that.

Um, so let’s move on to like some red flags things schools can’t really ignore. Right. So, you know, as we’re talking about blood work, which I’m always interested in my blood work personally ’cause I’m always like, what is going on? What can I fix? Um, and we’re comparing that to school websites. What would be the website equivalent to an alarming blood work result?

Tara? 

Tara: Well, of course if your website is going down a lot, that would be a big problem. And, and websites go down. Servers need to be updated. Even, you know, Amazon and Target, they have their seconds of downtime, I’m sure. Uh. So you, you may find that your website has a few downtime moments but you wanna make sure that they’re quick and hopefully your host has let you know that they’re happening.

But if there’s something broken on your site, I know with WordPress websites, this can happen with any website. It can happen. But you [00:11:00] can use, um, a monitoring tool. There’s a free tool called Uptime Robot that will send you an alert when your website is down. And that is important to know just so you can kind of keep track of it.

We monitor websites and we get reports when a website is down and oftentimes it’s, it really is like a a half a second or a second that a website will go down, not for any long period of time. If it does go down for a minute or more than a couple of minutes, then you wanna see what’s happening. And if it happens multiple times, then you really wanna check and see if there’s an issue with wherever your website is hosted.

Another really critical issue, especially for schools, is forms that don’t work. So I always recommend even, and this means not working for the user, but also not working in terms of letting you know that a form’s been filled out. So you wanna make sure that those emails are not going into your spam and that they’re getting delivered to you.

And there’ve been a lot of changes in the past couple of years with the way that email is. Sent and received [00:12:00] you may have had with MailChimp or other things that you might be using. You may have had to go in and edit records or your IT people may have to have had to do that. There are things called DMAC and SPF records, which help ensure that mail delivers, that email delivers.

Know that your website is not your, your content that you’re emailing is not spam, so if you don’t have that set up, it’s possible that your emails are not getting to you. So you wanna test your website’s forms. I recommend testing them every four to six weeks. Just set a note on your calendar to go in and just send your contact form or send your inquiry form to yourself just to make sure that.

It’s working that the response message is up to date. You know, if it says we’ll get back to you for our upcoming open house on January 3rd, and it’s now April, right? So make sure that the messaging there is correct and then also that you’re getting, or whoever is supposed to be getting them, gets those notifications that they’re being successfully delivered.

So you just wanna make sure that those forms are getting [00:13:00] through. And then, you know, a few things that I would say are not. Necessarily red alert type of things, but that are important is we are really focusing on accessibility right now, so making sure that your website works for users, even if they are using things like screen readers.

So making sure that you have the acceptable, um. HTML structure for your website so that a screen reader can read it. Make sure if you haven’t tried this before, make sure that you can click the tab button when you go to your website and that it will navigate you through your menu. Not many people do that to test it, but if you use the tab key, it should take you through all of the items in your navigation so that someone who isn’t using a mouse.

And it just has a keyboard can tab through and that also helps to indicate screen reader usage as well, which follows through that same type of process. You also wanna make sure that your color contrast, um, has enough con, your colors have enough contrast to pass WCAG [00:14:00] compliance. So that’s the accessibility standards and you want to just.

Pay attention to that. A lot of us haven’t been doing that over the years, and it’s just more recently that we are doing it. So you have to give yourself a little bit of grace to work through this. But it may require that you create some alternate versions of your brand colors in some cases. Because if your text is green, for example, and it’s not a very dark green, I can almost promise you that it is not.

There’s not enough color contrast if you’re using green as a text color. Same with orange. They’re colors that we love to use, but they are, um, notoriously difficult to create enough contrast. So you have to create an alternate version oftentimes for those. There are some free tools that you can use to check your color contrast, and just if you’re curious.

So, um, the wave accessibility tester is a chrome extension that you can put on your site or a website that you can go to. You can put in color contrast the color of your text and the background color, and it [00:15:00] will tell you if you are failing or passing that test. And then of course, a red flag, a red alert.

Would be having expired content. So if you have not gone in and taken off old events, if you don’t have a process that automatically expires them, that is not a good user experience for people who come to your um, website and. Are looking for an open house and all they’re seeing is dates that have passed, right?

So you wanna make sure that your calendar, that your events are up to date, um, and that your PDFs are downloading correctly and those types of things. So we always recommend doing some periodic checks of your site. And a broken link checker is a great thing to run every few months as well, because it may find a PDF that’s no longer there or something like that.

Aubrey: I love that you mentioned like almost calendaring, these things. Yeah. Like you were talking about the, um, fascinating things about the spam filters, by the way. Um, like checking your [00:16:00] submission, you know, every four, what did you say, four to six weeks? And then you know, these are the things I, I’m imagining people can put on their Google calendars, reoccurring events, um, just to remind them, this is the time to do it. Um, I also will say your accessibility pieces I mean that was eyeopening to me. I really appreciate your presentation on that because it’s something that we don’t think about, like different colors and having an alternate brand palette for that sounds just like a really smart thing to do.

Tara: Yeah. One more thing on accessibility that a lot of people don’t know about when we do accessibility scans now is what’s called ambiguous. Link text. Mm-hmm. So when you have things like learn more or read more. That does not pass accessibility standards because someone who’s using a screen reader only hears learn more, and they don’t know what they’re learning more about.

So you can put in some code that will hide that from a user who’s using their eyes to see the page, but will the screen reader will read, like, learn more about our history or something like that. But you can also try [00:17:00] to make a habit more of making your link text more descriptive so that it is more user friendly.

That’s something else you can do. 

Aubrey: That’s really important. Thank you. 

Tara: Yeah. 

Aubrey: Now, now let’s move on to, I, I know our school leaders who have full plates will love this one. Things schools panic about that really aren’t that urgent, right? 

Tara: Yeah. 

Aubrey: So what are things that schools tend to panic about, but really they don’t need to be a priority right now?

Tara: Yeah, so we are, many of us are very focused on getting everything right and we want everything to be perfect and we want an A grade on everything. So when you run some of these tests, you might panic because you have a B or a C grade. And I always tell schools not to, not to freak out about those things.

Because. It’s very hard in many cases, especially if your website is built with a platform that doesn’t really give you control over some of these elements. It’s very hard to score a hundred percent on [00:18:00] these. On some of these tests, the most important thing again, is your website load speed. So you may use GT metrics or the Google, um, tester to test your speed and you’ll see other things that it’s giving you scores on.

You don’t have to. Your website is still functional, even if your scoring is 60% on mobile in Google speed test, as long as it’s loading in under three seconds. So the other things that can be done like what’s called minifying code, trying to make your code less bloated, all of those types of things, they might not be things that you can actually.

What you can impact is putting images on your website that are optimized for the web or using a tool that will optimize them for you. Doing things to try to improve your website speed, but not really getting down into the weeds of, of not having a hundred percent or having, you know, having a score that seems lower.

Of course, we want to make it as good as we can, but as in terms of urgency, as [00:19:00] long as your website is loading quickly, that’s really a. The most important thing and all of the other things can follow after that, and you can work on them or have your website developer work on that. Some of those things, there are lots of tools.

If your website is built with WordPress, there are lots of tools that can help improve the performance of your website. But if you have a big video on your website, you’re never gonna have a perfect score because that takes up some, that takes some bandwidth to load, right? So you might. Consider not having the video play on mobile, for example, if it’s important to you that you have a better score, but.

May, you may decide that that’s a trade off. And so I think, you know, having, using some judgment here and, and not being so, so focused on just the grade, but also looking at what the results are and where you’re, what’s causing the score to not be perfect. It may not be something that you’re willing to, you know, to sacrifice.

’cause it may oftentimes will, may result in, in changing something about your design or something about your website that, that you’re really [00:20:00] wedded to.

Aubrey: That’s a really important thing to, to consider. Is there anything else that you can think of under this category that people worry about but it’s not really a priority? 

Tara: I mean, I think that accessibility is something that is becoming more and more important, and so. Sometimes schools will say, well, do we have to make our website accessible?

And you know, the answer to that is, well, that’s, that’s your choice. And at some point it may not be a choice. But it also is a process. It is not a project. So some of these improvements are things that can be done over time and that you can just have a goal to keep improving. Also, websites are living things.

So as you add content, as you add to your website and change things, your score is going to change. The other thing I didn’t mention is that you can run these website speed tests 20 times a day and get 20 different results. So sometimes it really matters on. What’s happening on the hosting server [00:21:00] at that time, if there’s a lot of load from other things that are on that server, that may also impact your load speed.

So a lot of the things that are happening behind the scenes with your website are not necessarily things that you control, but you wanna be paying attention to it. That’s the most important thing. And you wanna note if your website’s going down a lot or if it’s loading really slowly, why that’s happening, and figure out what you can do to improve that.

’cause that’s, that is important. I. 

Aubrey: Thanks Sarah. That is really important to hear. Like what, 

Tara: yeah. 

Aubrey: What is a priority and what’s not, right? 

Tara: Yep. And I think a lot of people now are coming and they’re saying we want more. We want our website to look, you know. More modern and we want things to be moving and we want, you know, we wanna see more interactivity.

And that is, that can be really nice, but you can have a really great website that doesn’t have things flying in and floating in and moving. Just because your website doesn’t have those things doesn’t mean it’s a bad website. As a matter of fact, for a lot of users that might be better. People who have, you know, different, different [00:22:00] health issues, they may not respond well to things that move too much. So you wanna really consider the most important things that I’ve talked about and not get really hung up on does my website have the fancy new feature? You know, does it have the new. Whatever it is the text is typing in or different cool things that you see, those are cool, but your website visitor is probably not as enticed by those things as you or your team might be, to be honest.

So you, if your website is communicating your message, if your images are good, you know, if the website loads fast and if it’s easy for people to find what they need, those are the most important things about for your website. So I wouldn’t get too, too hung up on. Fancy out like fancy bells and whistles because those are not urgent.

Those are not urgent. 

Aubrey: Yeah. Thanks. I would second that as someone who does a lot of online audits. Absolutely. Thanks Tara. Let’s move on to how often I love this part because it’s gonna be so actionable for people how often [00:23:00] schools actually check, like how to build all this into your workflow without it becoming another full-time job for our amazing school leaders.

Tara: Yep. So I think every four to eight weeks. That’s say, I would just say dedicate. 30 minutes, 45 minutes to your website check. And that means test your forms. That takes less than five minutes, right? Do a broken link check that takes less than five minutes. You know, just walk through some of your pages and make sure that they’re looking okay and nothing’s broken.

I think if you do that every month or two, that’s a really, you can feel more secure that your website is functioning. Well, and, and run a speed test as well while you’re at it. That only takes a few seconds also. Um, so I would say do those things when you get Google Search Console emails, you can, you might get those already periodically and you may see errors that come in.

I will tell you that 75% [00:24:00] probably of the time that those messages come in from Google Search Console, they are false alarms. It will say things, you know, it will tell you about there’s redirects on your site. Well, redirects are not necessarily bad, or it will tell you the text is too small or too close together and you’ll go and you’ll look at it and it’s fine.

So I, those often will, will clear up themselves, but it’s worth checking those when you get. Them or saving them up and checking them. So taking, paying attention, if you don’t have Google Search Console, get it and then sign up for those messages just so you can see them. But also know that those are oftentimes, they’re, those are usually not critical issues unless your website is down.

Um, and then quarterly I would say you know, test your website on, on your phone. Add that into the mix and. Go into your Google Analytics and your Google search console and just spend a little bit more time with it every quarter or so, just to make sure that you’re not missing something. Um, you could also, you know, take a look at the accessibility stuff, but that is a bigger, you know, that’s a [00:25:00] bigger bite.

That’s a bigger thing to, to, uh, to bite off. So you might need to devote a little bit more time if you’re concerned about accessibility or hire someone to do that scan for you so that you can kind of have a list of things to work on for your site. You could dive in deeper and, and do more, but I think if you just.

Check your site. A lot of people don’t even look at their own website. I know I’m guilty of that myself. Just I, I do also have a, a schedule on my calendar just to go in and kind of walk through the top pages of my site, make sure they’re looking okay, and there’s nothing that I forgot to update. So every month or two that’s, that’s really just, I would say just schedule that half an hour, 45 minute website checkup.

In terms of updating your overall website and the design and, and going through the whole entire, a whole entire refresh. You know, as I mentioned, just because your website isn’t doing fancy things, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, but you do want to make sure that you’re keeping your website. Relatively [00:26:00] fresh.

So every three to five years it’s a good idea to do a little bit of a facelift or a full facelift. Um, you may be having a new strategic plan or something that’s, that would be impacting the messaging on your website as well. So doing that all as part of a, of a bigger project, probably, you know, every five years or so is probably what most schools do, I think.

Aubrey: Yeah, that’s one of the questions that gets asked all the time. And 

Tara: you can update. Yeah, I was gonna say, you can update photos on your website and that can make it look. You know, a a lot different just by updating your photos. So you could do that every, every summer. A lot of schools will go in and just update their photos with photos from the year before.

And that’s, that can, that can do wonders to make you feel like, you know, it’s kind of like just changing your hairstyle or something. 

Aubrey: Love it. Um, well, we do like to be actionable on the Mindful School Marketing podcast. Yes. Uh, what is one thing you recommend them doing if they have, if a listener has 20 minutes right now, what is the most valuable thing they can do?

Tara: Yeah, run a, run a speed test. [00:27:00] Run a broken link test, test. And if you’re curious, run a, you use WCAG. Look. Look at the accessibility, put the extension on your chrome and, and run that through, tab through your website. Click the tab key and see, uh, how your website’s performing that way. And we haven’t talked about ai, but I get a lot of schools asking me about, you know.

GAO and this is going beyond the scope of this topic of this, um, episode today. But I will say if you’re also on this, you know, kind of taking this 20 minutes, just go in to chat GPT and put in, you know. What can you tell me about an, about independent schools in whatever my town and see what it says about if it, if it brings up your school, or what can you tell me about my school and just see what it already knows, because that, that’s a really fun exercise.

And schools are always surprised at how much they they AI already knows about them. 

Aubrey: Oh yeah, there’s some some interesting surprises that come up during that. 

Tara: Yeah. Yeah. 

Aubrey: So 

Tara: [00:28:00] I’m gonna put in the show notes, I’ll link to all of the things that we’ve talked about, that I’ve mentioned, all the tools I’ve mentioned, and I’ll also put in like a website checkup tool that you all can use that I put together as well.

Aubrey: Awesome. You’re so generous, Tara. Thank you so much. Thanks for letting, uh, me pick your brain about websites today. Thanks 

Tara: for letting me talk about it. 

Aubrey: Fabulous. Where can people find more, learn more about you and about websites and everything that you do? 

Tara: So my website is design tlc.com, and you can sign up for a free consult or you can look through our pretty extensive blog.

We have a lot of information that can answer a lot of questions for you. I also just put a chat bot on my own site. So go ahead and test that out and see um, how it works for you if it answers your questions. Excited. 

Aubrey: I’m curious to 

Tara: hear. 

Aubrey: I know I am. I’m gonna go test out your chat bot too. Um, this is fantastic, Tara.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank for being the co-host and thanks for this great 

Tara: episode. Thank you. I can’t wait to turn the tables on you soon. 

Aubrey: Oh, it’s gonna be fun.

Thanks for [00:29:00] joining us on the Mindful School Marketing Podcast. We’d love it if you pop into iTunes and leave a review. Five Star Preferred. Let us know how you like the show. It helps us improve what we’re doing and helps others find us too.