I’m glad to see you’ve pushed past the word “audit” - it’s not a particularly exciting word, and if you link it to “tax” it’s almost certain to strike dread into your heart.
However, when it comes to websites, a website audit is a very constructive exercise with potential for very positive outcomes. If your website is a few years old or you don’t feel it’s living up to expectations, then a website audit could well point out its strengths and weakness, and opportunities for improvement.
Naturally, your best option is to get a professional to cast an experienced eye over your website and pull together a report with recommendations that you can pick and choose whether to follow up. All the same, you can run your own mini-audit yourself to check a few things - keep reading 😀
A website audit can bring a few benefits;
- Show up better in search engines - Ensure that your key pages are following the ‘rules’ that search engines like Google expect from a well-behaved webpage, and that the important details are being made available to search engines so that they can correctly list and rank your page(s). For example, does each page have a Title that is specific to the page content? So don’t have a title of “Welcome”!
- Improve the user experience (”UX”) - Have your webpages been constructed with the visitor-reader in mind? Think about how people will actually use the website and its pages. Can they get to and back from pages quickly and easily? Can they find what they’re most likely looking for quickly and easily, eg. your contact details?
- Boost performance - It’s important that you don’t make people wait more than a couple of seconds for a page and its elements to load, attention spans are very short these days. Measuring how fast a page loads and what is slowing it down identifies aspects that can improve a website's performance.
- Pinpoint strengths - It’s not all about looking for what’s wrong! As a website owner, it’s good to know what IS working for your website so that you can build on that and be sure not to interfere with it.
Here’s a few things you can do now;
Speed test - While there are many items that contribute to a slow or a fast website, and the perceived speed will vary from day to day depending on a wide variety of conditions, it’s still good to have a feel for whether your site is ‘slow’ or not. A good rule of thumb is that if a webpage is taking more than 10 seconds to load, you have a problem and you are losing visitors because of it. Head over to pingdom.com to get a rating, and also to webpagetest.org. Run a test a few times over a few days to get an average.
Search engine ranking - Have you tried looking for your own products and services, or even your own organisation/business name? You’ll need to put yourself in the head of the person you’re expecting to look for your website - what words/phrases would they look for? What results does the search engine show and where do you appear in the list? Do your webpages even contain those words/phrases so they can be matched to a search?
Content review - It may be difficult to see the wood for the trees, but here again you are trying to see your website and its content (words & images) from the perspective of your visitors who may not be familiar with what you do. Are you explaining clearly without jargon? Are you guiding visitors on what to do next eg. fill in a form, phone, buy something, sign up to a newsletter? Ask friends, colleagues, customers/clients for their opinion, odds are you’ll get great suggestions. Be sure to keep your questions specific though, eg. could you easily find what you wanted?
If you’d like to poke into your website a bit more, be sure to get our free Website Success Guide with 6 key focus points for website success. It also comes with a short sequence of emails that build on what’s in the Guide. Check it out now.
