How long have you had your website for? When was the last time you changed the design on your home page? How long does it take you to type in the URL? These are all small aspects considered by any successful company or entrepreneur who wishes to maximise their potential.
With accessibility to information getting ever quicker due to speedy internet-related and technological developments, the need to remain up-to-date, fashionable as well as highly visible is greater than ever. Time is often of the essence too, which is why checking SEO and accessibility of your website or proofreading content on your new host becomes so much more of a chore.
But the beauty of technological development, is that there are applications and tools at hand to speed this process up, without missing out any steps along the way. Sometimes, evaluating how searchable you are on a machine search engine is best assessed by, well, machines themselves. So, if you need to remember to check both your SEO and your accessibility after the migration, you can do so using a free tool, such as Siteimprove’s free Website Accessibility Checker.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/siteimprove/
The overall aim of a successful website migration is to make your company or brand visible to everyone on the planet. There should be no discrimination when it comes to what people are and are not able to access, especially with the internet playing an increasingly larger role in all our lives. Designing a website is a big job and something you put hours and days into; perfecting the layout, the content, the optimisation, the position of links, the design. And migrating your production is essentially doing all that all over again on an alien host which you are most certainly not accustomed to, without the accessibility security blanket you previously trusted.
What Siteimprove does, is allay those worries and fears. With the free Website Accessibility Checker tool, a top to bottom URL check will be performed to assess the accessibility compliance of said URL and grade it with a score. All the checks are based on criteria set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is an internationally recognised framework for evaluating accessibility standards. The Score is given with the following grades:
- A: highlights the most critical accessibility issues
- AA: the recommended level of accessibility
- AAA: highest level of accessibility (but not applicable as a compliance standard across your whole website)
This grading system allows you to identify which areas of your website require attention and need tweaking to ensure that equal distribution of access is available. Therefore, there will be no barrier for persons with disabilities or slower network connection for example and in performing these checks, you are also protecting your brand image against potential discrimination.
Getting content live on the internet or onto a platform is crucial but ensuring that this content can reach all audiences is just as critical. Accessibility is something that is often overlooked but by using tools such as the Website Accessibility Checker created by Siteimprove, especially at an early stage, you can steal a march on the competition.
