I have watched plenty of episodes of “Air Crash Investigations” on TV, and once had a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator for Windows 98.
Therefore, I am basically a fully qualified armchair pilot.
My exhaustive knowledge of aviation indicates that pilots will regularly check their instruments and controls work as expected before taking off.
This means the passengers can go to work on draining the bar cart and then all queuing en masse during the descent for the toilet, safe in the knowledge that the plane is functioning as intended.
However, very few businesses bother to follow this testing and checking process when it comes to their websites.
One of the saddest marketing stories I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing is that of a business that had spent mucho $$$ on a flashy new website, only to get no inquiries through what could only be described as an exquisite work of digital art.
Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and yet no leads came through.
The site was getting traffic from a variety of sources, and it all seemed to be targeted - so what was the problem?
When the client engaged my services, I decided to go back to basics, and tried filling in the “request demo” form on the site (which was the only real CTA).
Nothing came through.
I tried again, and once again, nothing.
We got someone else to try ... nothing.
It turned out the demo form had never been set to send the inquiries anywhere.
To the end user, it looked like their inquiry had been sent. But the sales team never received the message, and the user never got a follow up.
Now this is a particularly grim example, but I still see this kind of mistake happen far too often.
Investing time, money and energy into marketing only to have people unable to complete the desired action on your website due to some technical faux pas is about as disastrous an outcome as you can experience.
That’s why I encourage you to regularly check that your site works as expected.
This is especially important if your site is running on Wordpress and using a lot of plugins (particularly ones you have installed for free or downloaded from dubious sources) as WordPress forced updates or plugin updates can sometimes break things.
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