Website Audit – WHY?

For starters, if anyone in the organization is giving you pause about your existing website, please consider an unbiased 3rd party opinion.

An annual audit will keep your website on track, let you know your overall online health, and enable you a plan out a clear website/online marketing path for growth and expansion.

Even if you are not competitive by nature and are floating by with referrals, you’re still going to want to revisit this list every so often. We check weekly if not monthly on most of our clients. Technology is just moving too fast now to ignore this. No one wants to get hacked. No one wants to have a stale brand or an outdated website. Don’t get left behind!!! DO THE AUDIT! If not us, someone!

WEBSITE AUDITS include:

  1. CONTENT & DESIGN 
    • Look and Feel of website
    • Branding
    • Functionality
    • User Flow
    • User Experience
    • Content Authority & Voice
    • Test of Authenticity and uniqueness
  2. STABILITY – Software Updates
    • Apply available security patches / updates
    • Update & Maintain content management system updates
      i.e. Upgrade WordPress to the latest version
    • Upgrade all plugins to their latest version to maintain stability
    • Backup existing custom WP theme
    • Ensure that the site is not vulnerable
    • Remove any unneeded website extensions
    • Remove any inactive website administrators
  3. DEPENDABILITY  – Website Backups
    • Back-up core files using BackUpBuddy or BackUpWPPro that make your website work!
      (can also backup WordPress natively via FTP as well as backup the MySQL database via your
      hosting account’s cPanel or PhpMyAdmin)
    • File/database backups – auto performed once per weekly (min)
    • Backups stored offsite (Amazon S3)
    • Restore from backup once every 3-4 months to ensure backups valid;
      this ensures that if/WHEN the site gets hacked, we’ll get up and running FAST!
  4. RESPONSIVENESS
    • Desktop versus Mobile versus Tablet views
    • How does the website resolve from one device to the next
    • Screen Compatibility – we use Screenfly to check how screens look from desktop to device
    • Browser Compatibility – great tool is Browser Stack
  5. BACK LINKS – CHECK BROKEN LINKS 
    • Checking for back links on your website is natural part of SEO program. Are any of them high quality? Low quality?
    • Run link checker to crawl site and look for broker links that frustrate users
      and reduce search engine rankings
    • Check for 404 (Page not found) errors and fix link or set up redirect
    • Update broken links, broken images, etc.
  6. SITE SPEED
  7. SEO STRENGTH / SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
    • Check Google Webmaster Tools for any crawl errors.
    • Identify structural issues with site that may affect how search engines view our site (i.e. missing titles, duplicate content – (PAID service – Moz.com – Search > Crawl Diagnostics report)
    • Identify new referrers that are sending traffic to your site.
      (In Google Analytics go to Acquisition > All Referrals)
    • Make recommendations to freshen content on website
  8. ANALYTICS

    • Create a Google Analytics dashboard to highlight the most important metrics for your site.
    • Look for trends (good or bad) in your key metrics.
  9. SPAM & SECURITY HOLES
    • Incorporation of DISABLE comments ensures that we’ve closed up ANY loop holes in the site by preventing comments or other potentially spam-like content!
  10. CALL TO ACTION FUNCTIONALITY AUDIT
    • In itself, we can spend days on just this section!
    • Test any important functionality (i.e. working contact/signup forms, donation forms, etc.) to make sure everything is secure and working properly 🙂
    • Test website across all internet browsers and multiple devices and provide feedback
  11. ADMINISTRATIVE / OPERATIONS / IT TOOLS
    • Domain, Hosting and Dedicated IP address management – remind you when things are due to expire to ensure smooth operation . Want to learn more about DNS, CLICK HERE
    • Update your copyright date in your footer and update other date references
    • Ensure any dated content is up-to-date