How to evaluate your website from security/performance/value PoV

The issue of making a correct evaluation of a web site is one that should be addressed by any site owner at some point.
The most important metrics of a web site that are a must will be discussed bellow.

SECURITY
I do not know how to stress the importance of this metric. This is so important that if you have a problem with it the other metrics do not count.

If security is an issue your site can be compromised at any moment and you can lose value very fast. Look at what happened to Yahoo and the data breaches. The value of the site dropped to the bottom of the ocean.

Best tool to evaluate how you stand at this metric is Qualis SSL Labs free tester
If you do not get an A+ do not despair just follow the recommendations given by the test result page.

To harden the security of the site you can follow my posts:
1. Security: Maintaining a secure WordPress blog
2. #Apache: Use #letsencrypt.org certificates with an apache server behind a secure reverse proxy
3. Use LetsEncypt and https they are free and easy to configure

See my A+ result here is not hard to obtain.

PERFORMANCE

Does not matter how much content you have and what wonderful world changing ideas and tutorials you got on your web site if the site is slow like a snail.
No old Internet geek wants to relive the glory days of BBS sites that loaded one minute per line and the millennials have the 5s attention span of a goldfish 🙂

Do not bloat your web site and make it load fast. The general rule is that if the start page loads in above 3s you already start loosing visitors (see the above goldfish visitors) if is above 5s then you have a slow site.

A very good test is Pingdom Website Speed Test
You can choose 4 regional servers from where to test:
1. Dallas, Texas, USA
2. Melbourne, Australia
3. San Jose, California, USA
4. Stockholm, Sweden

My advice is to test all of them to see how well your site responds to different parts of the world.
I got :
3.45s Load Time for Dallas, Texas, USA
8.14s Load Time for Melbourne, Australia
5.92s Load Time for San Jose, California, USA
3.86s Load Time for Stockholm, Sweden

Again read carefully the result page extremely useful information and hints to improve the site are there.

As I do not use a CDN service to distribute geographically my site so I am pleased with the results (sorry Aussies).

See my post Speed up a wordpress site to see how I handled this topic.

VALUE
This is the most hard to evaluate metric of a site. There are sites worth from 0$ to $2.41 Billion.
The value of a site depends on a lot of subjective criteria but an approximation can be made from using several metrics.

My favorite tool is Website value calculator.

According to it at 29/05/2017 the value of:
google.com -> $2.41 Billion
blog.voina.org -> $584

It seems I have a lot of catching up to become rich from selling my site 🙁

Update, after one year 11/06/2018 the value of:

google.com -> $2.41 Billion

blog.voina.org -> $1,390

I am catching up … 🙂