In this post, we are going to show you how to conduct a WordPress site audit to improve your website’s health.
We follow the exact process to perform a regular WordPress site audit for our clients.
It will help you identify possible issues on the website so you can fix and improve your website performance.
This detailed website evaluation will include:
- Website Design Audit
- Website Functionalities Audit
- Website Performance Audit
- Website Content Audit
- Website Technical SEO Audit
Pro Tip
Don’t just analyze your homepage. Make sure to check every single page of your website to get the maximum benefit of the WordPress site audit.
Let’s get started!
WordPress Site Design Audit
Consistency plays an integral part in your website design and leaves a massive influence on user experience.
According to the latest survey, 94% of negative website feedback is related to design rand 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site if they’ve had a bad experience. In order to avoid this, you need to make sure that your website design is such that it maximizes user experience.
Thrive Market is an American e-commerce membership-based retailer company. This company is offering natural and organic food products at reduced costs. In 2015, all traffic paths led visitors to an email capture wall, without the option to browse. The only exception was PLA traffic.
The biggest objective of Thrive Market was to drive conversions and increase organic sessions. SEMrush helped Thrive Market’s teams to find exactly which words to use and also helps identify other ideas that might be hiding nearby.
By having a regular WordPress site audit, CPA of Thrive Market site goes down by 50% while conversions increase 2x with a 3-5x increase in organic sessions.
Also, a clear keyword database enabled effective writing and resulted in them ranking for 124k keywords in Google.
Website design audit includes analyzing all the design elements of your website to ensure design consistency, which will help you to maintain the original design of your website.
Essential elements of website design audit are:
- Logo
- Navigation
- Header
- Footer
- Image sizes and formatting
- Content formatting
Make sure to evaluate your website design on all these points on all of the web browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Firefox, Safari and also on all devices like iPhone, iPad, Mac etc.
It’s a good idea to have a complete website design audit once a month. And the best tools that can help you check your site’s layout on different browsers and screen sizes are:
Pro Tip
In your website page anything above 2MB is considered heavy and causes an error to appear. During website design audit, if found anything above 2MB then we recommend you to put your page design on a diet.
WordPress Site Functionalities Audit
A well-functioning website can help sell clients or customers to your business. You will start losing out potential leads if your site is not functioning properly and will leave an overall negative impression of your brand.
Make sure that your website functionalities are working fine for all devices as well. According to the latest survey, 85% of adults think that a company’s mobile version of their website should be better than their desktop version.
Siemens Healthcare is a leader in medical imaging technologies and the world’s largest healthcare technology suppliers. A few years ago, they observed some issues for the functionality of the software.
Challenge was to reduce test execution times and add multi-technology support to avoid any further issues. By having regular site functionality audits using best tools like Ranorex they got a reduction in test duration by 10%. Furthermore, they simplified workflows by creating flexible and shareable code modules and test automation steps.
Website functionalities audit includes the analysis of website functionalities – how it works or how it functions.
Keeping your website functionalities in working order is crucial to the success of your website. All you need to do is review all of your website’s features regularly.
For example:
- Drop down menus
- All navigation items
- Internal links
- 3rd party links
- Social media profiles
- Testimonials
- FAQs
- Blog
- Likes and shares plugin
- Comments
- Test contact forms
- Subscribe forms
- Tab functionality
- Text enlarge functionality
- User friendly
If you have an e-commerce website, we will highly recommend spending some extra time to audit the shop functionality.
Following tools can be handy to audit broken links, image ALT texts and other relevant details:
Pro Tip
Instead of having a stand-alone testimonial page only, it will be better to use different testimonials on all service pages as well. This will help to improve your website conversion.
WordPress Site Performance Audit
A website performance audit lets you discover your website’s weak points. It measures the website’s performance and finds opportunities to speed up the page loading.
Do you know, slow-loading websites cost retailers £1.73 billion in lost sales each year, and around 47% of website users expect a maximum loading time of 2 seconds.
You can divide the website performance audit into three parts:
- Front-End website performance audit
- Back-End website performance audit
- Hybrid website performance audit
Douglas is a famous cosmetics brand. In 2017, they observed that the page loading time of their website was around 20 seconds. So, they started to have a regular website performance audit.
In 2018, they reduced the page loading time to 8 seconds only. So, they started to work on the technical things with regular WordPress site performance audits. Now, their average page loading time is 4 seconds, with an increase of 25% organic visibility.
Front-End Website performance audit includes:
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Website performance audit tips |
Status |
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Detailed analysis of all individual web pages |
Checked
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Tracking progress |
Checked
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Competitive analysis |
Checked
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AJAX analysis |
Checked
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Proper code review |
Checked
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Baseline metrics having CSS, JS, media size etc |
Checked
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Triaged recommendations for page components |
Checked
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Server setting details |
Checked
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Usually, the back-end website performance audit explores the effecting factors of front-end content delivery.
- Server setups
- CMS
- Module configuration
- SQL query efficiency
- CSS files
- Recommend improvements of these factors
- Locate target pages etc
A hybrid website performance audit combines both front-end and back-end analyses.
Its analyze the two main components:
- Web page speed
- Server configuration
Automated performance tools include:
These tools can give you useful metrics and guidelines.
Pro Tip
If you have more than one external CSS file, each one adds to your page load time and this is unavoidable. Try to merge your CSS files and its better to use Internal or even Inline CSS. Sometimes all these CSS/JS files coming from plugins/3rd Party so its better to use plugins as less as possible.
WordPress Site Content Audit
Do you know, users spend around 6 seconds looking at a website’s written content and before they decide to leave or stay on the site. Approximately 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content doesn’t look pretty on the page.
Website content audit gives you a detailed report on how well your website content is performing in terms of SEO and driving traffic.
Furthermore, it provides you with valuable information about website content that is performing well and the potential low hanging keywords you can target to increase your website traffic.
Moschino is an Italian luxury fashion house, specializing in leather accessories, shoes, luggage and fragrances. Back in 2018, Moschino lacked online visibility. The well-known fashion brand only ranked for their branded keywords.
The company was about to start working on general keywords and needed a strategy. So with the regular website content audit, they get a +38% increase in visibility for non-branded keywords with an increased flow of users with high search intent.
Evaluate your website content on these points:
- SEO checks on content, keywords, images, tags
- Content consistency
- Bulleted or numbered lists to communicate essential points
- Ensure that page titles, URLs, and meta descriptions are Google-friendly
- Fix broken or expired links
- Landing pages have a few and short paragraphs
- Creative headlines
- Content should be written for search engines and humans
- Remove duplicate content
- Correct spelling and grammar mistakes
These points will help you to evaluate site content and take the necessary action for improvement.
These points will help you to evaluate site content and take the necessary action for improvement. Keeping your website content up to date and fresh helps to improve your site’s SEO and drive better content marketing results.
Here are a few tools and plugins which can help you out for your website’s content audit:
- DYNO MAPPER tool
- WOORANK tool
- Content Audit plugin
- DEEP CRAWL tool
Pro Tip
A few quality content pages are better for SEO than lots of low-quality pages. Having a few pages will also make it easy for most webmasters to audit their site regularly.
WordPress Site SEO Audit
Do you know, a correctly done website SEO audit – gives you a better insight into your website, individual pages, and improve website traffic?
Website SEO audit helps you to determine how your website is performing in search engines and gives you a detailed report about where you need to put effort to improve it.
Around 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.
A detailed report of the complete website’s technical SEO audit includes the issues related to:
- Website structure
- On-page SEO factors
- User experience etc
Simply Recipes’ mission is to help readers get food on the table with less stress and more joy. Back in 2016, Simply Recipes had an extensive recipe library, yet its traffic was in decline. The website relied on organic search for 70% of its traffic.
They decided to take a hard look at their SEO practices and turn the tide. After the regular WordPress website audit, they get 56% organic traffic growth with an easy and comprehensive competitor and keyword research.
Follow these points and get the results for your Website SEO Audit:
- Mobile-friendly website
- Speed of your website
- Indexation analysis
- Status codes
- Redirects
- URL structure
- Robots.txt
- XML sitemap
- Check zombie pages
- Check indexing problems
- Organic traffic
- On-page SEO
- Check backlinks
- Find broken links
- Content checking
- Check internal links
- Featured snippets optimization
A regular website SEO audit is essential to check the health of your website.
Pro Tip
Always remove all zombie pages from your website. It makes the rest of the website SEO audit much easier because fewer pages mean fewer problems.
Conclusion
Conducting regular WordPress site audit is essential to improve your website performance and increase leads for your business. By having regular website audits, you can identify issues and fix them on time.
However, if you need help with your website audit, feel free to shoot us an email using this form.
Source: https://wpsupportdesk.com/blog/wordpress-site-audit/
