Do I Need to Update My Website? How to Perform an Easy Website Audit
By Hanna Landis | hanna@hannalandisdesigns.com
Hanna Landis owns and operates Hanna Landis Designs, a web design agency in Tacoma, WA. She helps businesses brand, design, build, and optimize their online presence. Learn more: https://www.hannalandisdesigns.com/
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These days your website is your virtual storefront—the face of your business—and it requires the same care and attention you would give to keeping a brick-and-mortar storefront attractive, accessible, and inviting.
When your website is out of date or difficult to navigate, it is similar to allowing your store to fall into disrepair. Keeping your website up to date, in both design and functionality, doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. The best way to determine if your website needs a little TLC is to perform a website audit. Here’s how!
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit is an in-depth analysis of the elements of your website that impact your visibility and ranking on the internet. An audit is your first line of defense against the issues that can impact leads, sales, and your company’s overall growth.
Professional audits will do a deep dive into the technical, structural, and design elements of your website and even evaluate the performance of your digital marketing, such as blogging and social media.
Learning to self-audit your website, however, is a great way to continually ensure your website is up to date. Your audit will reveal the following information about your website:
- Page load speed – Your website should be up and running within 5.3 seconds or less!
- Page size – If pages are too large, it could be slowing down your site.
- Broken Links – Make sure your audience can find what they are looking for.
- Mobile responsiveness – Is your site accessible to people on their mobile devices?
- Image size – Large images also slow down website speed.
- Bounce Rate – Are visitors staying on your site or leaving rather quickly?
- SEO – This reviews links, indexing, and metadata.
- Visitor behavior – How long are visitors on your site and which pages do they open the most?
Even the smallest issue can dramatically impact your search engine ranking, website performance, and whether or not your site visitors become paying customers. If you want to grow your business, reach new audiences, and improve online sales, then the best place to start is with a website audit.
How to Perform a Self-Audit
Performing a comprehensive website audit takes an investment of both time and money—whether you do it yourself or hire a professional. There are some amazing free tools, however, that will allow you to do your own simple audit.
- Your first stop should be Hubspot’s Website Grader. This free tool takes just moments to use and provides a great starting point to understand how your website is performing technically. Simply plug in your website URL and your email address, and you are on your way to gaining quick insight into your web performance.
Website grader will also show you if there are some more technical issues with your website, such as code that isn’t working properly or images that are too large. You’ll receive a score for four different areas:
And even some recommendations on how to fix the issues!
- While Website Grader shows you the technical side of your site, in order to understand audience behavior—and determine whether your design is out of date—you’ll want to use Google Analytics. This free tool will help you analyze how your audience experiences your website.
Some of the key data to observe here is:
- Number of visitors to your site
- Bounce rate
- Session duration
- Behavior (or how visitors interact with each page on your site)
Google Analytics can help you determine if certain pages on your site aren’t doing their job and driving customers to purchase. A high bounce rate or low session duration may indicate that you need to update your website copy, clarify your product or services, and work on your calls to action (CTAs).
- If you want to dive even deeper, paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you understand what keywords your competitors are using to rank well on Google. Grabbing hold of this information can help you find the right keywords to use in your website copy and improve your SEO. These two tools also evaluate your social media and content quality to help you improve your content marketing and message.
Once you have reviewed the data using the above tools, the next step is to implement the necessary changes on your website.
Everything from minimizing photo size to reworking your site design can help keep your website fast, fresh, and user friendly.
If the information you receive from a website audit feels overwhelming, or the technical details are challenging to interpret, you can always get customized feedback—and an even more in-depth audit—from a professional web designer.
Yet, even learning to do a quick and simple audit on your website is an important part of keeping your storefront open and inviting, helping you gain momentum in your business.
Ready to maximize your online presence? Download your free Website Audit Checklist for more great tools and an easy step-by-step self-audit guide.