Like everything, websites require adjustments occasionally to help improve their experience and efficiency. Running a website audit ensures that you are able to fix any issues that may be preventing traffic from your site. No matter what size your business is, audits are crucial to assess what problems your site has with technical issues, SEO, and user experience.
By taking time to audit your site, you are giving yourself and your brand more opportunities to identify and improve pages or content that are underperforming or having a negative impact on your website. Integral for site development, you should try to perform a website audit every three months.
Defining a Website Audit
A website audit is a process of examining your website’s performance before tackling SEO and/or website. Doing an audit helps you understand why your website isn’t generating enough traffic, it helps you see technical issues, understand why your sales and conversion rates aren’t developing properly, and how you can improve your user experience.
Once you have located problems, you need to fix them. Ensuring that you have the technical knowledge is critical for fixing issues on the site. If you don’t have this know-how, it is advised to pass it on to someone in your organisation who understands development or hire someone to help you.
Table of Contents
What Does a Website Audit Include?
Website audits are important because they inform you of how our website is performing, what is working properly and what needs to be amended to allow for smooth functioning. This will eventually help you rank better and produce more traffic. Here are some of the things that should be included in every website audit.
Site Security Audit
While SEO and web design are naturally some of the first things that any website owner would choose to assess and monitor, website security is equally as important to prevent any issues for potential customers.
Cybersecurity breaches happen daily, to small and large companies, so ensuring that your site is catered for security-wise is integral. These issues can massively impact large companies but research from the National Cyber Security Alliance found that 60% of small businesses end up closing only six months after a security breach.
Finding what sections of your website that are vulnerable allows you to identify breaches and fix them before anything serious happens like a data breach or leak of personal information.
Site Health Audit
This might seem like an obvious one to mention but ensuring you do a site health audit is crucial. A site health audit helps analyse the usability and the architecture of a site. You can find issues or gaps in areas like:
- Meta description
- Broken links
- Site structure
- Internal linking
- External linking
- Page speed
- Page titles
- Load times
There are plenty of tools to help you run a site health audit but two of the best available are Google Analytics and SEMrush. Once you have run an audit that takes full consideration of these factors, you will be able to ensure that your site is running at maximum efficiency and performance.
Content and SEO Audit
Content is king and it is important to analyse content performance to see what is working on your site and what is lagging. Doing an SEO and content audit can help you identify duplicate content, issues with broken links, alt tags and meta descriptions.
Having faulty content can confuse crawler bots that report their findings to search engines. This can hurt your rankings making it pertinent to regularly audit your SEO and your content. Creating relevant and unique content that engages an audience is a great way to attract prospective customers.
Competitor Site Audit
One way of consistently improving your site is to do a competitor site audit. Through doing this, you can gain a unique insight into what your competitors are doing that is performing well and learn from their achievements.
You will be able to know how to improve your processes and deal with problems within your niche. This helps you implement a strong and rounded digital marketing strategy that takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
Social Media Presence Audit
Every social media campaign is created as a means to drive traffic to a website and turn prospective customers into sales. Using social media strategies that have good calls to action or lead forms or even signing up for a newsletter is a great way to drive engagement.
Struggling to get this type of engagement? It might be because you don’t have a well-optimised site that prioritises user experience and has good UI. Assessing your social media engagement will also help you make the right decisions when fixing your website after a site audit.
Penalty and Recovery Audit
Want to uncover issues you think might have been found by search engines’ algorithms? Running a penalty and recovery audit to see what manual or algorithmic issues you are having to help recover your site and begin to rank again.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Audit
Want to understand more about the users that visit your site? Use CRO or conversion rate optimisation to find out what people do when they are on your pages, how they move through the site, and why they might not be converting. For any action a user takes on your site, you have to appreciate:
- Who you are optimising for – your target audience
- What to optimise – what content isn’t performing well
- Where to optimise – what pages need to be reviewed.
How to Audit Your Website
Once you have decided you need a website audit, your next step is to do it. Creating a functional plan will help you deliver what you need to have a high performing site.
Your plan can help you show the SEO efficiency of your site, you can analyse your site’s competitors and learn from their gains, you can identify issues and how to make the correct changes, and you can make a plan for your website’s future development. We’ve put together some tips on how you can audit your website.
Perform a Site Crawl
Site crawls are a great way to check for any issues your site might be experiencing. You can use tools like SEMrush and Screaming Frog SEO Spider to gather this intel. Site crawls help you identify sections of your site that aren’t accessible to bots.
This could be a myriad of issues from disallows, coding issues, and no index commands. You can also check for 404 errors on your site. These contribute to a negative user experience and can cause high bounce rates through broken links. This negatively affects SEO as do 500 errors. These are usually due to issues with your internal servers. Things like 502 bad gateway and 503 services unavailable are some of the issues you will see with your site.
Another major issue is duplicated content. Doing a site crawl will allow you to see what content has been duplicated, including title tags and meta descriptions. Also, ensuring that redirects are properly implemented is critical. 301s allow an old URL to be directed to an existing page. This helps you maintain SEO rankings and allows people to access vital content.
Sort Your Technical SEO
Technical SEO can be made easy through tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and Screaming Frog Spider. You can use an SEO audit tool to rewrite page titles, write solid meta descriptions, and check for canonical URLs.
Having solid page titles makes it much easier for Google and users to understand what is on the page. There should be unique titles on every page, they should be under 50 characters with a target keyword included, and they should explain what is on the page.
Meta descriptions are also integral for good SEO. They are longer than titles and are able to elaborate for Google and users to what is on the page that they have clicked on. It should be engaging and attractive to users, encouraging them to click on your page and read on. They need to be unique and not duplicated content as well.
Another part of technical SEO you need to be aware of is checking for canonical tags. These tell search engines to index and rank the right pages. If you have the same or similar content on your site, signalling to Google which one should be indexed is important. This is done through canonical tags.
Make Sure Your Site Loads Quickly
Site speed is particularly important for user experience and it can prevent traffic and create a high bounce rate if your pages are too slow. A 1 second delay can result in 11% decrease in traffic, according to the Aberdeen Group, which is not good for business.
Another factor is that Google is fully aware of how fast your site is. This means that if your competitor’s site loads faster than yours, even if it is a mere second, Google will display their content before yours.
There are plenty of methods to ensure that you have appropriate website speed. Tools like GTmetrix, Google Page Insights, and Pingdom are a great way of testing your site’s speed. With GTmetrix, you can test your page in different countries, different browsers, and see suggestions on how to improve speed for your site. Google PageSpeed Insights analyses speed and gives suggestions, as does Pingdom.
Develop Your User Experience
User experience or UX is vital for traffic. If your site has a poor user experience, it can hurt SEO and rankings, and drive traffic to other sites. There are a few things you can do to ensure that your site has a good user experience. This area is important to consider as it helps users navigate your site better.
One major layout decision that can help with user experience is adding imagery and video. They are engaging, help sell products or services, and encourage users to stay on your site longer, decreasing your bounce rate. Another thing to consider here is using white space. It allows content to be more readable, helping them focus on elements of surrounding text.
With design in mind, choosing a good colour palette or scheme for your site is integral. These should align with your brand and be consistent to draw attention to your products or services.
Using a strong CTA or call to action is a great way to instruct your visitors on what you want them to do next. Having a CTA on every page above the fold ensures that visitors notice them. Another lovely way to help with user experience is to include client testimonials on the site to give a peer review of the brilliance of your products or services.
Ensure you have a functioning navigation bar is important for the user experience. It is what helps users find what they are looking for when they land on your site. The menu should link to your most important pages and be easy to understand, don’t add extra things that it doesn’t need.
Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly
Now considered one of the most important parts of site optimisation, ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is crucial for being promoted by Google. Back in 2015, Google announced a mobile-friendly algorithm that was going to boost mobile search rankings.
They deliberately were giving mobile-friendly sites an advantage as nearly everyone has a mobile device that they use to search the internet on. There are a variety of audit tools to check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not. Google even has one that allows you to see a screenshot of your site on a mobile device.
Do a Website Audit and Improve Your Rankings
Website audits are an increasingly important part of every solid technical strategy. They allow you to keep up with trends, improve your online presence, and update your content to ensure it is relevant and engaging to your users. It can be a technical process and a tedious task but you will see solid results over time when you put in the work.
Regardless, sometimes these audits can be confusing and overwhelming. If you are unsure of where to start, contact ProfileTree to see how our team of digital marketers can transform your website and improve rankings. Check out this related article – WordPress SEO with Yoast: The Ultimate Guide
Unmasking the Power of Audits
Website audits are more than just technical checks – they’re opportunities to unlock hidden potential and propel your online success. But how much impact can they truly have? Let’s dive into some eye-opening 2023 website performance statistics, showcasing the areas where audits can unleash significant improvements:
Load Times:
- Average website load time in 2023: 2.8 seconds (Source: Google PageSpeed Insights)
- Every second of delay beyond 2 seconds decreases conversions by 7% (Source: Portent)
- 47% of users expect a website to load in under 2 seconds (Source: Hubspot)
Mobile Readiness:
- 53.69% of all website traffic now comes from mobile devices (Source: Forbes Advisor)
- Non-mobile-friendly websites have a 53% higher bounce rate (Source: Search Engine Journal)
- Mobile-friendly websites convert at a 67% higher rate on mobile devices (Source: Smart Insights)
Security Compliance:
- 74% of users abandon a website if they see a security warning (Source: GlobalSign)
- Data breaches cost businesses an average of $4.24 million (Source: Ponemon Institute)
- Websites with SSL certificates experience a 17% increase in conversion rates (Source: ClickZ)
These statistics paint a clear picture: performance matters, mobile dominates, and security is paramount. Website audits can reveal hidden weaknesses in these crucial areas, allowing you to:
- Optimize load times: Identify bottlenecks and implement solutions like image compression, caching, and code minification.
- Enhance mobile responsiveness: Ensure your website adapts seamlessly to all devices, improving user experience and boosting mobile conversions.
- Strengthen security: Address vulnerabilities, implement HTTPS encryption, and comply with data privacy regulations.
By addressing these areas through website audits, you can unlock significant opportunities:
- Increased conversions: Faster loading times, enhanced mobile experience, and stronger security build user trust and drive more sales.
- Improved SEO: Search engines prioritize fast, mobile-friendly, and secure websites, boosting your organic ranking and visibility.
- Reduced bounce rate: Users stay longer and engage more when your website performs well, leading to better brand perception and customer loyalty.
Don’t let your website languish in the shadows of hidden performance issues. Unleash the power of a website audit and unlock your online potential in 2023 and beyond!
Your Website Audit Methodology Deep Dive
A website audit isn’t just a checkbox exercise – it’s a comprehensive exploration of your online haven. Let’s delve deeper into our methodology, revealing the specific elements we examine across technical, UX, and design aspects, along with the tools and approaches we wield to uncover hidden opportunities:
Technical Audit:
Site Speed:
- Tools: Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest
- Focus: Page load times, resource optimization, caching strategy, code minification.
- Actionable insights: Identify slow-loading pages, optimize image sizes, leverage browser caching, minify code for faster execution.
Mobile Responsiveness:
- Tools: Google Mobile-Friendly Test, MobileFirst.io, Browser DevTools
- Focus: Layout adaptability, touch interface optimization, viewport rendering, responsive images.
- Actionable insights: Ensure proper element sizing and spacing for mobile devices, optimize buttons and forms for touch interactions, address viewport rendering issues, use responsive image formats.
Security:
- Tools: Qualys SSL Labs, Sucuri SiteCheck, Acunetix
- Focus: SSL certificate validity, malware detection, vulnerability scans, data privacy compliance.
- Actionable insights: Secure your website with a valid SSL certificate, scan for malware and vulnerabilities, implement secure coding practices, comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
UX Audit:
User Flow and Navigation:
- Tools: UserTesting, Hotjar, Crazy Egg
- Focus: User journey mapping, navigation efficiency, call-to-action clarity, conversion funnel analysis.
- Actionable insights: Identify confusing navigation paths, optimize CTAs for better visibility, streamline user flow for intuitive interaction, analyze conversion funnel drop-off points and address them.
Content and Readability:
- Tools: Readability-Score.com, Hemingway Editor, Grammarly
- Focus: Content clarity, SEO optimization, user engagement, accessibility compliance.
- Actionable insights: Ensure content is clear, concise, and relevant, optimize for relevant keywords, address readability issues, improve accessibility for users with disabilities.
Design Audit:
Visual Hierarchy and Branding:
- Tools: Google Analytics, ClickTale, EyeQuant
- Focus: Visual hierarchy, brand consistency, user attention cues, color palette effectiveness.
- Actionable insights: Ensure key elements stand out visually, maintain consistent brand identity across all pages, analyze user attention patterns and optimize content placement, refine color palette for optimal impact.
Usability and Accessibility:
- Tools: Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, WCAG Checker, WAVE tool
- Focus: Font size and readability, keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, color contrast.
- Actionable insights: Ensure proper font size and spacing for readability, enable keyboard navigation for all elements, test website compatibility with screen readers, ensure sufficient color contrast for users with visual impairments.
Remember, this is just a sample – the specific elements examined and tools used will vary depending on your website’s unique goals and target audience.
Sample Website Audit Report Templates: Unmasking Opportunities for Growth
A website audit report shouldn’t just be a laundry list of problems – it should be a roadmap to success. Here are two sample templates outlining structure, scoring benchmarks, competitor comparisons, issue severity coding, and clear distinctions between observations and recommendations:
Template 1: Comprehensive Report
1. Executive Summary:
- Briefly summarize key findings, highlight major strengths and weaknesses, and provide a high-level overview of recommended actions.
2. Website Overview:
- Analyze website goals, target audience, and current performance metrics like traffic, conversions, and bounce rate.
3. Technical Audit:
- Scoring Benchmarks (0-10):
- Page Speed: 10 – Blazing fast, 5 – Needs optimization, 0 – Unacceptably slow.
- Mobile Responsiveness: 10 – Flawless adaptation, 5 – Minor issues, 0 – Unusable on mobile.
- Security: 10 – Fully secure, 5 – Potential vulnerabilities, 0 – Major security risks.
- Competitor Comparisons: Compare key technical metrics to relevant competitors.
- Issue Severity Coding:
- Critical: Urgent attention required, potential for significant negative impact.
- High: Important to address, can hinder website performance and user experience.
- Medium: Worth addressing for optimal performance and user satisfaction.
- Low: Minor issues, can be addressed at your convenience.
- Observations: List identified technical issues with clear explanations and supporting data.
- Recommendations: Provide actionable steps for resolving each issue, prioritizing critical and high-severity issues first.
4. UX Audit:
- Follow the same structure as the Technical Audit, focusing on user flow, navigation, content, and design aspects.
- Use user testing data, heatmaps, and analytics to support observations and recommendations.
5. SEO Audit:
- Analyze on-page optimization, keyword targeting, backlinks, and technical SEO elements.
- Provide recommendations for improving organic search ranking and visibility.
6. Cost Estimation and Timeline:
- Estimate the time and resources required to implement recommendations.
- Offer phased implementation plans to prioritize critical changes and manage budgets.
7. Conclusion:
- Summarize key findings, reiterate the potential for improvement, and express your commitment to helping the client achieve their website goals.
Template 2: Lean Report
- Focus on critical and high-severity issues impacting website performance and conversions.
- Use a bullet-point format for observations and recommendations, prioritizing clarity and conciseness.
- Offer a quick-win action plan for immediate implementation of the most impactful changes.
- Provide access to a more comprehensive report for detailed analysis and competitor comparisons.
FAQ: Unveiling Your Website’s Hidden Potential with Audits
Q: How often should I conduct a website audit?
A: Ideally, aim for an annual audit to stay ahead of trends and address emerging issues. For rapidly changing industries or websites with high traffic, consider semi-annual audits.
Q: What are the benefits of a website audit beyond technical improvements?
A: Audits can improve SEO, boost user engagement, increase conversions, and enhance brand perception. They also uncover opportunities for cost-saving by identifying resource inefficiencies.
Q: Can I conduct my own website audit?
A: While you can use free tools for basic checks, a professional audit offers deeper insights, competitor analysis, and actionable recommendations tailored to your specific goals.
Q: How much does a website audit cost?
A: Costs vary depending on the scope of the audit, your website size, and the level of customization. We offer flexible packages to suit your budget and needs.
Q: What happens after the audit?
A: We provide a comprehensive report with prioritized recommendations and implementation support. We can also help you manage the execution process and track progress towards your website goals.
Conclusion: Unleash Your Website’s Potential with a Powerful Audit
Your website is your digital storefront, and a website audit is the key to unlock its hidden potential. Just like a regular checkup for your physical health, a website audit reveals areas for improvement and equips you with the knowledge to make your online presence thrive.
Don’t let your website languish in the shadows of hidden performance issues, missed opportunities, and outdated strategies. Take control of your online success story today. Schedule your website audit and embark on a journey of optimization, growth, and achieving your digital dreams.