It’s important to perform a website audit on a regular basis, particularly before a major website redesign. Evaluating your website can help determine if it's optimized to meet your goals, and for you to find ways to improve your website's performance.
If this is your first time or if it's been a long time since you've done website evaluation, seek out the help of a professional (an individual or a team) who has the technical know-how to execute this process effectively.
What are the benefits?
One of the main benefits of a site audit is achieving increased website performance. Generally, this is the ultimate goal for both technical and content aspects. A website evaluation allows you to check the strength of your site's technical framework, asses if it is search-engine-friendly and can be easily navigated by visitors.
An audit also allows you to enhance your SEO by identifying overlooked SEO opportunities, remedying poorly executed SEO practices throughout your site's content, and re-focusing your SEO strategy to put your site visitors first before the search engines. This protects your site by minimizing the impact of the constantly changing search engine algorithm.
Also consider reassessing your site's lead generation and conversion rates during evaluation. This will help you to identify overlooked opportunities to convert site visitors into leads. Remember to include relevant call to action statements and pinpoint deficiencies in landing pages to improve conversions.
Why do you need a website audit?
Below are 15 reasons why auditing your website is important.
(1) The internet is ever-evolving and, so are the standards.
(2) Change in best practices, software, device compatibility occur quickly online. Your site should be able to handle and adapt to these changes.
(3) It can help you find the probable cause as to why your site is not converting visitors into customers.
(4) You can derive insights from analysis reports with regards to how well the graphics are optimized. You can also get insights into consumer behavior that could affect your strategic plan.
(5) Analysis reports provide insight on your website traffic rank (i.e. increase or decrease of site visitors), search percentages, and bounce rates, showing the popularity of content on your site.
(6) You have a basis for modifying your site's components that impede performance.
(7) Using the traffic report that your site audit has generated, check where your traffic is coming from and which keywords are being used by visitors to land on your site.
(8) You'll be able to identify and repair broken links which are affecting your site's functionality.
(9) HTML errors, that present website pages incorrectly on browsers, can be identified and fixed.
(10) The analysis can provide a review of how/why your site is too slow.
(11) Erroneous page output is often caused by incorrect character setting and this can be identified and fixed during the audit.
(12) Ensuring that your site contains 'link juice' is another reason for performing site evaluation. It checks link juice flow to pages which helps in achieving optimum search engine ranking.
(13) Download time is often impacted by the size of your website, so an audit is necessary to also achieve optimized bandwidth usage.
(14) You can also check if website security has been compromised via security audit. This requires the use of a server and security testing software.
(15) Human error such as duplicate input of page titles and metadescriptions can be checked and fixed during an audit.
There are still many other reasons to perform a site audit to ensure that yours is secure, safe to users, and compliant to all the applicable standards. However, as mentioned, you will need the expertise of a professional company that offers this type of service.
Fast Track has been performing website audits for our customers for years, and we'd love to provide the same service to you. Contact us today and let's get started.