How to perform a website audit: Key areas to focus on

A website audit is essential for keeping your site healthy, improving user experience and boosting search engine rankings. Whether you're a business owner or a web developer, regularly conducting a website audit helps you identify and fix issues that could harm your site’s performance and impact the user experience of your potential customers. In this guide, we’ll explore some key focus areas to ensure a thorough website audit.

1. Website performance and speed

The first step in any website audit is to check your site’s performance. A slow website can lead to a poor user experience, resulting in high bounce rates (which negatively impacts your SEO).

Here's what to look at:

• Loading time: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to evaluate your website's speed.
• Image optimisation: Ensure all images are compressed with the smallest file size possible. Use tools like TinyJPG or Pixlr.
• Server response time: Check if your hosting server is slowing things down. Using a tool like Pingdom will help you monitor server response times.
• Caching: Make sure caching is configured correctly to improve speed.

2. SEO audit

A website audit should include a detailed SEO check to ensure your site is well-optimised for search engines. Key aspects include:

• On-page SEO: Review meta titles, descriptions and header tags to ensure they are optimised with relevant keywords.
• URL structure: Make sure URLs are short, descriptive and contain target keywords.
• Sitemaps and robots.txt: Ensure your XML sitemap is up-to-date and that your robots.txt file is correctly configured to guide search engines.
• Internal linking: Review your internal links to ensure they make sense and spread link equity across important pages.
• Backlinks: Check the quality and quantity of backlinks to your website.

We offer an SEO consultation and report service if you'd like to find out how your website is currently performing in terms of SEO.

3. Mobile-friendliness

With mobile traffic now surpassing desktop traffic, ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is critical for a good user experience. Google’s mobile-first indexing also makes this a crucial factor for SEO. Use Google’s Lighthouse tool to check how your website performs on mobile devices (this is available in the development tools within the Google Chrome browser). Things to watch for:

• Responsive design: Make sure your site adapts smoothly to different screen sizes.
• Touchscreen usability: Ensure buttons and links are easy to tap without zooming in.
• Mobile page speed: Ensure mobile pages load quickly, especially on slower networks.

4. User experience (UX)

A website’s user experience affects not just SEO but also conversion rates. As you audit your website, it’s worth looking at:

• Navigation: Is your website easy to navigate? Can users find what they’re looking for quickly?
• Content layout: Ensure your content is easy to read, with clear headings, bullet points and enough white space.
• Calls to action (CTAs): Are your CTAs well-placed, clear and easy to click?
• Forms: Test any forms on your website to ensure they are working correctly and do not cause frustration for users. Contacting a company and hearing nothing back is a surefire method of getting your customers to approach your competition.

For hints and tips about how to improve your website's user experience, take a look at our article 5 website UX mistakes that are costing you customers.

5. Security

Website security is important for your site's safety and for building trust with your visitors. A security audit should focus on:

• SSL certificate: Check that your site has an SSL certificate installed, which is crucial for data protection and SEO (Google will favour a site with an SSL certificate in its search results).
• Software updates: Ensure your CMS, plugins and templates/themes are up-to-date to prevent any potential security vulnerabilities.
• Backup system: Make sure your backup system is working, and you have recent backups stored offsite.

We have website admin + maintenance packages available where we ensure your website software is up-to-date and secure.

6. Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the behind-the-scenes aspects that affect your website’s ability to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Key areas to focus on include:

• Crawlability: Use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to ensure all important pages are crawlable by search engines.
• Broken links: Identify and fix any broken links (404 errors) that can hurt user experience and SEO. Use a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth to check your site for broken links.
• Redirects: Ensure 301 redirects are correctly in place for any outdated URLs.
• Schema markup: Use structured data to help search engines better understand your content.

7. Content quality

Audit your website’s content to ensure it is valuable, relevant and optimised for your target audience. Things to check:

• Duplicate content: Identify and eliminate duplicate content that may harm your SEO (read our article: What is duplicate content?).
• Keyword optimisation: Ensure that each page is targeting specific, relevant keywords.
• Content freshness: Review old blog posts or pages and update them to maintain relevance.

8. Accessibility

An often overlooked area of website audits is accessibility. Ensure your website is usable by people with disabilities by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Areas to review include:

• Alt text for images: Make sure every image has descriptive alt text.
• Keyboard navigation: Test whether your website can be navigated using just a keyboard.
• Screen reader compatibility: Ensure your site is compatible with screen readers for visually impaired users.

9. Analytics and reporting

Finally, you’ll want to analyse your website’s traffic and user behaviour. This helps you understand what’s working and where improvements are needed:

• Google Analytics: Review traffic trends, bounce rates and user flow to identify problem areas.
• Heatmaps: Use heatmap tools to see where users click the most on your site.
• Conversion tracking: Check if your goals and events (such as form submissions) are being tracked correctly.

Conclusion

A comprehensive website audit is crucial for maintaining a successful website. By focusing on key areas such as performance, SEO, mobile-friendliness and user experience, you can identify and address issues before they harm your site’s success.

Regular audits ensure that your website stays optimised, secure and user-friendly, which ultimately helps grow your business.

By following these steps, you'll clearly understand your website’s current status and how to improve it for better results. Happy auditing!