How do you audit your website for improvements?

1 Assess your site speed

To begin your website audit, it is important to check how quickly your site loads on different devices and browsers. Site speed is essential for SEO and user satisfaction, as slow pages can negatively affect your rankings and increase your bounce rate. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom can be used to measure site speed and provide suggestions for improvement. Common ways to increase site speed include minifying and compressing code, images, and videos; using a caching plugin or content delivery network (CDN); eliminating unnecessary redirects and plugins; and optimizing server response time and database queries.

2 Evaluate your site structure

When conducting a website audit, it's important to assess how your site is organized and navigated. A clear and logical site structure can help your users find what they are looking for, as well as improve your SEO by making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. You can use tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Google Search Console to detect any issues with your site structure, such as broken links, 404 errors, duplicate or thin content, missing titles and meta descriptions, inconsistent URL structure, breadcrumbs, or navigation menus, and lack of internal links, sitemaps, or schema markup.

3 Analyze your site content

The next step of your website audit is to review the quality and relevance of your site content. Your content is what attracts and engages your audience, as well as signals to search engines what your site is about and how it should be ranked. To analyze your site content and metrics, you can use tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or SEMrush. These tools can provide insights into traffic, conversions, bounce rate of your pages and posts, keywords and topics that drive organic search visibility and clicks, content gaps and opportunities in your niche, as well as the freshness, length, readability, and tone of voice of your content.

4 Optimize your site for mobile

When auditing your website, it's important to ensure that it is responsive and user-friendly on mobile devices. Mobile-friendliness is a key ranking factor for SEO, as more and more users are searching and browsing on their smartphones and tablets. You can use tools like Google Mobile-Friendly Test, Google Lighthouse, or Google Search Console to check how your site performs on mobile and get recommendations on how to optimize it. To make your site more mobile-friendly, consider using a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and orientations, scaling and compressing your images and videos to fit the mobile viewport, simplifying your layout, menus, and forms, and avoiding pop-ups, interstitials, or intrusive ads that block the content or the user's action.

5 Audit your site security

The final step of your website audit is to verify that your site is secure and trustworthy for your users and search engines. Site security is a critical element of SEO and user experience, as it safeguards your site from hackers, malware, and data breaches. You can use tools like Google Safe Browsing, Sucuri SiteCheck, or SSL Labs to scan your site for any security issues or vulnerabilities, such as lack of HTTPS protocol or SSL certificate, outdated or infected software, plugins, or themes, suspicious or malicious links or scripts, and unsecured forms or login pages.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?