INTRODUCTION
A website audit is a comprehensive evaluation and analysis of your website. It allows you to step back and review your site objectively, identifying areas that are performing well and those that need improvement. Regular website audits are crucial for ensuring your site remains up-to-date, user-friendly, and optimized over time.
There are a few key reasons why conducting regular website audits is so important:
- Your website is often the first touchpoint between your business and potential customers. An outdated or poorly performing site can negatively impact conversions and revenue. Auditing helps identify issues.
- User expectations and behaviors change over time. A website audit allows you to keep up with user trends and ensure your site provides an optimal user experience.
- Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. Without regular audits, your website may not be fully optimized for current search ranking factors.
- New opportunities and technical improvements arise frequently. Auditing keeps you aware of new features, tools, and optimizations to implement.
- Competitor sites are also evolving. Auditing enables you to monitor their offerings and progress.
- Old content and functions become less relevant. Audits help identify stale or irrelevant sections to update or remove
SET GOALS
The first step in auditing your website is to identify your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Setting clear goals at the outset will allow you to measure the success of your website audit and determine which areas need improvement.
Some examples of website goals include:
- Increasing website traffic
- Growing newsletter subscribers
- Boosting online sales
- Improving brand awareness
- Generating more leads
For each goal, define 1-2 quantifiable KPIs that you can track over time. Common website KPIs include:
- Monthly unique visitors
- Bounce rate
- Pages per visit
- Conversion rate
- Lead generation forms completed
- Sales revenue
Analyze Traffic
Your website traffic analytics provide invaluable data to audit and determine where your visitors are coming from, what pages they view, and how they interact with your site. Start by looking at the following key metrics:
- Overall site traffic – Total number of visitors and pageviews over time. Look for trends and fluctuations.
- Traffic sources – Where visitors come from, such as organic search, social media, paid ads, and referrals. Identify high-potential channels driving quality traffic.
- Landing and exit pages – Entry and exit points. See which pages attract visitors and which cause them to leave. Optimize poor performing pages.
- Bounce rate – Percentage of visitors who enter and leave from the same page without further site interaction. High bounce rates indicate content issues.
- Top pages – Most visited pages. Prioritize optimizing popular pages to maximize engagement.
- Page dwell time – How long visitors remain on a page. Low dwell times signal content gaps.
Analyzing your traffic data reveals website strengths to leverage and weaknesses to improve. Pay attention to changes over time and test ways to boost engagement.
Assess Design
A website’s design greatly impacts the user experience and ability to find information. When auditing design, first take an objective look at the overall visual appeal. Is the color scheme pleasing or does it cause eye strain? Are there obvious branding elements and is the design cohesive across pages?
Next, examine the layout and information architecture. Is there a clear navigational structure? Do the menus and links make logical sense? Users should be able to easily scan headings, find common elements like the search bar or contact info, and quickly navigate between pages. Assess whether the layout follows conventions or may confuse users.
Finally, check ease of navigation on both desktop and mobile. Can users find what they need in just a few taps or clicks? Tap or click through the header, footer, and main navigation links to ensure they work as expected. Check that page load speeds are fast. A slow, cluttered, or confusing layout will cause users to leave. Frequently review analytics data and run user tests to catch any emerging issues.
Evaluate Content
A critical part of auditing your website is evaluating your existing content to determine if it is fresh, relevant, and optimized with keywords. Here are some tips for analyzing your content:
- Review content age: Scan through all your website pages and blog posts to see when they were last updated. Content over 2 years old has likely gone stale and should be refreshed. Outdated information hurts your credibility.
- Check for relevance: Assess whether your content still aligns with your business goals and targets the right keywords. If the focus of your company has shifted, old content may no longer be a fit.
- Analyze keyword usage: Examine if your content utilizes keywords appropriately, matching terms users are searching for. Evaluate if titles, headers, meta descriptions, image alt text, and the body contain keywords at the right density. Too many or too few keywords will negatively impact SEO.
- Compare to competitors: Research what terms competitors are ranking for and if there are any gaps where you can create content around valuable keywords they are missing.
- Fix thin content: Identify pages with little content as they tend to rank poorly. Bulk up thin pages by expanding the word count and adding multimedia.
- Check for duplication: Scan for content published on your site that is duplicated elsewhere, as search engines penalize for duplicate content. Eliminate redundant or repetitive content.
Check Performance
The performance of your website plays a key role in keeping visitors engaged and prompting them to take action. Slow load times or a poor mobile experience can quickly drive visitors away.
First, evaluate your site speed. Use online speed test tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix to measure your homepage load time. Aim for under 3 seconds on desktop and mobile. Identify any page components slowing things down like large images, videos, or complex code. Optimize these or load them after initial page render.
Next, check mobile optimization with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Confirm your site is mobile-friendly and doesn’t have issues like small text or buttons. Click around on mobile to ensure a seamless experience without horizontal scrolling or broken pages.
Finally, do an SEO audit of your site’s technical components. Make sure your site has a sitemap, robots.txt file, structured data markup, alt text for images, and clean internal linking. Check that pages load efficiently for search engine crawlers by testing with Google Lighthouse. Address any issues flagged to improve SEO.
By evaluating and enhancing performance, you’ll provide a smooth, fast experience that engages visitors and helps search engines understand your content.
Review Security
It’s crucial to audit your website’s security and protect against vulnerabilities that could lead to attacks or data breaches. As part of your website audit, you’ll want to:
- Run security scans to check for malware, viruses, and other threats. Use tools like Sucuri SiteCheck or Wordfence to scan for malware and identify security issues.
- Check that your site has an SSL certificate installed and that HTTPS is enabled. This encrypts connections and protects user data.
- Make sure any plugins, themes, and software are up to date. Outdated software is more vulnerable to security flaws. Regularly update WordPress, themes, plugins and other software.
- Review user roles and permissions. Limit admin access and use the principle of least privilege to improve security.
- Check for vulnerable components like unprotected folders, default admin accounts, etc. Hackers can exploit these.
- Review your backup schedule and test restores. Backups allow you to recover from data loss or breaches.
- Switch to managed WordPress hosting if not using already. This includes security features like firewalls, backups, and 24/7 monitoring.
- Consider security plugins like Wordfence or iThemes Security to harden WordPress security. They offer firewall protection, login security, and more.
- Review site registrar and DNS settings. Make sure your domain isn’t vulnerable to hijacking or unauthorized changes.
Auditing your website’s security isn’t just a one-time task. Make it part of your regular website maintenance to keep protecting your site and users over time.
Gather User Feedback
Getting feedback directly from your users and customers is one of the most important steps in auditing your website. Their input will provide valuable insights into how they actually use and experience your site.
There are a few key ways to gather user feedback:
- User surveys – Create online surveys and questionnaires asking users for ratings and open-ended feedback on different aspects of your site like design, content, ease of use, etc. Offer an incentive for completing the survey.
- User testing – Observe real users interacting with your site by having them complete common tasks while thinking aloud. Note where they struggle and succeed to identify issues.
- Analytics review – Look at analytics data using tools such as Google Analytics on popular vs. low-trafficked pages, bounce rates, and other metrics to understand how people navigate your site.
- Social media monitoring- Monitor social media conversations related to your brand to gain unsolicited feedback about the user experience.
Soliciting regular feedback through these methods will provide invaluable insights to help you improve and optimize the user experience. Focus groups are also a great way to get more detailed qualitative feedback on your site’s usability. Making your site more user-friendly will build loyalty and attract new visitors through word of mouth.
Create Action Plan
Based on everything you learned in your website audit, it’s time to create an action plan to improve your website. Clearly identify the priority areas that need to be addressed first. Use the audit findings to decide which issues are most urgent or impactful to tackle.
For example, if your content is outdated and thin, make content creation and optimization a top priority. Or if site security has vulnerabilities, focus immediately on fixing those. Don’t try to solve every problem at once. Target the critical weaknesses and opportunities first.
Once priority areas are identified, break them down into specific action steps. Outline the tasks and resources needed to successfully execute each initiative. Be realistic about what can be accomplished in short 1-3 month sprints versus longer 6-12 month timeframes.
Define success metrics and results to evaluate the impact of planned improvements. This will help assess if the actions are achieving the desired benefits. Continually optimizing a website takes dedication over time. But a thoughtful action plan allows you to work smarter, not just harder.
The audit provides the roadmap, and the action plan gets you to your destination efficiently. Know where you want your website to be in the future, and plot the course to get there through targeted enhancements. With a solid website strategy and commitment to continual improvement, you will reach your online business goals.