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Internal Server Error

When was the last time you checked to make sure that your shopping cart works correctly? How about the links on your web site? Or your contact me form? A couple months ago, I had poked around my blog and discovered that my Feedburner feature wasn’t working properly. While this discovery wasn’t earth-shattering, it was still something that needed to be fixed. But what if it had been the subscription link to my newsletter? How many subscriptions would I have missed in between the time it actually broke and the time I discover that it was broken? What about your web site? Is your shopping cart working? Your “email me” link? Your contact me form?

Don’t count on the visitors to your site to let you know if something is not working right. The majority of visitors will just leave the site without notifying you that’s something’s wrong. Perhaps your web host did a routine upgrade that disables something on your site. Or you made a change to your site or added a page that somehow messes something up. It may be months before you stumble on the fact that people can’t buy anything from your web site…which is really not good.

So every so often, as part of your regular maintenance, you should check your site over and test everything. This includes:

  • Your images- Make sure all of your images appear like they’re supposed to. Replace any broken images that are stored on your web site and remove broken images that are linked from outside web sites.
  • Your links and navigation- make sure that your links goes to where they’re supposed to go…this also means any mailto links as well. Remove or correct any incorrect links.
  • All your online forms- send yourself a message through your online form and see if it works
  • Your newsletter- Try subscribing and unsubscribing to your own newsletter to make sure that this works properly…send a copy of your newsletter to yourself and see what your customers see…make sure that your mailing list program sends you a copy of your newsletter from now on so that you get your newsletter everytime you send one
  • Your shopping cart- If your shopping cart has a test mode, go through the ordering process and see if you can complete an order…or at the very least, make sure that you can add or substract things from your shopping cart. And don’t forget to take your shopping cart out of test mode once you’re finished testing!
  • Any kind of multimedia- If you have Flash, audio, or video on your site, be sure to check these too…make sure that the files load up like they should…make sure they like they play like they should and watch out for error messages.
  • Error messages- Keep an eye out for any error messages that may pop up as you navigate through your web site. Take note of what the error message says, what page the error occurs, and what steps you took before the error appeared.
  • The speed of your site- Take note of the speed of your web site. Is it taking a long time to load up? Are there certain pages that seem to just hang and never completely load? If your site seems to be slow, there can be a number of different reasons why. The most common culprit is usually the size of your images. Make sure that your images are properly formatted and sized. Another common culprit is inefficient HTML code or poorly installed programs and databases. If the slowness seems to affect your whole web site, consider checking with your web host to see if there is a problem on their end that may be slowing up your site.