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How to Conduct a Successful Website Audit in 3 Steps
Category: Web Design
6 mins read
Don't dread a website audit—embrace it. Audits are how you give your online business a checkup and keep it in top shape. Regular audits help you identify issues and opportunities to improve your search rankings, user experience, and results. Technology changes fast, so even the best websites need audits to keep up. This guide will show you how to perform your own comprehensive audit in three simple steps. Think of an audit as an investment in your success and the best way to optimize your site. Stop fearing audits—they're how you stay healthy and competitive.
In this article:
Part 1. What Is Website Audit
A website audit is simply a comprehensive evaluation of how your website is working. We perform audits on all types of important business assets like finances, equipment, and processes, so why not your website? Your site is a key part of running an online business today, so auditing how it's functioning is critical.
A website audit assesses more than just how the site looks. It dives deep into how well it's optimized for search engines (SEO), how user-friendly and engaging it is (UX), how fast it loads (performance), how stable and secure it is (technical), and more. Even the best websites in the world need regular checkups to keep up with the latest website standards and technologies. A website audit identifies issues and opportunities across all areas of your site so you can make improvements to better serve visitors and build your business.
The question isn't whether your website needs an audit—it's whether you know what shape your site is really in. It may look fine on the surface but have lots of problems you can only detect with a comprehensive audit. Think of it like going to the doctor for a physical. You may feel perfectly healthy, but blood tests and medical exams can uncover issues you wouldn't otherwise know existed until they become bigger problems. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
A website audit gives you essential information to make important decisions to support your key business objectives like higher search rankings, more traffic, better conversions, and increased revenue. Don't leave your website's health to chance—get it audited regularly by a professional. A good audit and action plan for changes is an investment that will pay off considerably in keeping your site optimized and competitive.
Part 2. Types of website audits
There are several types of audits you can perform on your website, each focusing on different elements. It's a good idea to start with an overall site audit that covers all areas briefly, then dive deeper into targeted audits based on your priorities.
A technical audit evaluates things like your site speed, mobile-friendliness, HTML code, and server performance. It aims to detect any issues that could cause downtime or a bad user experience. A technical audit ensures your site uses current best practices and technologies.
An on-page audit examines your actual page content, URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, images, and internal linking. It helps determine how well optimized your pages are for search engines like Google and Bing. An on-page audit can lead to improvements in your search rankings and traffic.
An off-page audit looks at factors like your backlinks, mentions on other sites, and social signals. It provides insights into how influential and authoritative your site appears to search engines based on external links and references to your content.
A UX or user experience audit assesses your site navigation, design, calls-to-action, and other elements that impact how users engage with your content. It aims to identify any friction points or areas that reduce visitor satisfaction and conversion rates.
A competitive audit benchmarks your site performance against industry leaders and direct competitors. It can reveal useful data on things like differences in page load times, mobile functionality, backlink profiles, and search rankings that you may want to address.
Auditing your website regularly using different types of audits is the best way to stay on top of changes in technology and user needs. Fixing problems as they arise and optimizing based on new opportunities will result in achieving key business goals like higher traffic, better rankings, improved conversions, and increased revenue over the long run. Does your website need an audit? The answer is yes—now the question is just where you need to start.
Part 3. How to Host a Website
1. Set Goals and Get Buy-in
The first step in conducting a comprehensive website audit is defining your key goals and getting stakeholder buy-in. You need to determine:
- What do you aim to achieve or improve from auditing your site? Common goals include higher search rankings, increased traffic, better conversions, improved user experience, etc. Be as specific as possible in setting concrete goals to guide your audit scope and recommendations.
- Who needs to be involved or on board? Website audits often require input and approval from leadership, marketing managers, agencies, developers, and others. Identify who needs to participate and determine the best ways to communicate your audit goals and get their support early on.
- What is the available budget? The depth and types of audits you perform depend on funds allocated. Meet with relevant teams to discuss budget for optimizing and improving your site based on audit findings before getting started.
- Are there any constraints or limitations? Consider any restrictions like fixed content management systems (CMS), fused design templates, location in a site redesign cycle, etc. that could impact your audit recommendations. Keeping key players aware of limitations will produce an audit that balances ideal changes with feasibility.
- How will results and progress be measured? Having a plan for monitoring key metrics like changes in search rankings, traffic, conversions, and revenue over a set period of time provides accountability and determines success from your audit and optimization efforts. Discuss measurement benchmarks with stakeholders before launching your audit.
Defining the scope and goals of your website audit upfront, identifying the right participants, determining limitations, securing budget, and developing a results measurement plan gets all parties on the same page about what will be evaluated and optimized as well as what success will look like. With website management often involving multiple teams or vendors, gaining buy-in through clear communication and goal-setting is half the battle. A strategic audit aims to provide focused recommendations that take all of these logistical factors into account. The first step is making sure you have agreement and resources to act.
2. Assemble Your Audit Team:
Conducting a comprehensive website audit requires a combination of skills and expertise. It's a good idea to assemble an audit team that includes:
- SEO or Technical Experts: Professionals with experience auditing websites for search optimization and performance are a must. SEO experts can evaluate on-page and off-page ranking factors while technical specialists assess site speed, mobile-friendliness, security, coding, and server performance.
- UX or Design Professionals: Involving user experience and web design experts helps audit a site's navigation, content presentation, visuals, calls-to-action, and overall layout based on best practices for usability and conversion. They identify both friction points and optimization opportunities.
- Content Strategists: Seasoned content creators and strategists play an important role in auditing existing page content, blog posts, product descriptions, and other copy on your site. They determine content gaps, suggestions for improving keyword use and content presentation, and recommendations for new content needed.
- Business Stakeholders: Members of your internal marketing team, product managers, sales staff, and others should also provide input during an audit. They best understand your key business goals, customer needs, branding guidelines, and more. Stakeholder participation helps ground recommendations in what's most practical and impactful.
- Developers: Website developers, especially those involved in building your current site, should ideally be on the audit team or at least looped in on key findings. Their feasibility review of recommended changes, timelines, and budget impacts is critical before finalizing your audit report and optimization plan.
A strong, well-rounded audit team provides multiple perspectives and complementary areas of expertise. The technical, user experience, content, business, and development insights gained from group discussions shape recommendations that balance ideal changes with practical limitations. Each team member also brings a unique set of skills for conducting different audit types efficiently. For the most comprehensive and actionable website audit, assembling the right combination of experts is a must. Two heads—or in this case, a whole team—are better than one.
3. Identify Issues and Solutions
With your audit team assembled and goals set, it's time to dive in and analyze your website. Using professional audit tools and your team's specialized expertise, review all areas of your site to detect:
- Technical issues: Assess your site speed, mobile optimization, HTML code, server performance, security, and backups. Look for any problems that could affect site functionality, downtime, or user experience. Identify solutions to resolve them.
- On-page issues: Evaluate page titles, meta descriptions, content, images, URLs, internal linking, and keyword use. Determine how your pages could be better optimized for search rankings and user engagement. Suggest on-page changes needed.
- Off-page issues: Examine your link building, social media mentions, reviews, forum discussion, and bookmarking. Look for ways to strengthen signals outside of your site that influence search visibility and authority. Develop an off-page optimization strategy.
- User experience issues: Review your site navigation, calls-to-action, content presentation, visuals, and layouts. Note any areas that could be confusing, frustrating, or unappealing to visitors and compromise conversions or time on site. Suggest UX enhancements to address them.
- Content issues: Assess your existing blog posts, page content, product info, and other copy. Determine if you have content gaps that need filling, if existing content could be improved for search and user needs, or if seasonal or event-based content is needed. Provide guidance on optimizing and planning content.
Documenting your findings, suggested fixes, and recommendations in detail provides an audit report you can review with your stakeholders and developers. Prioritize issues based on impact and ease of resolution. The end result is an agreed upon optimization plan with timelines for implementing changes to improve your site experience, performance, content, search rankings, and conversion rates.
Conclusion
In short, a comprehensive website audit is essential for success. By evaluating your site from all angles and developing an expert action plan to address issues identified, audits provide the insights you need to optimize performance, boost rankings, increase traffic, improve conversion rates, and drive revenue growth. For your key business objectives, a regular website audit is the most valuable investment you can make.