The ultimate guide to auditing websites | Ryte magazine

The ultimate guide to auditing websites

Discover why website audits are important for your business, define your website audit goals and more.

Are you looking for a complete, easy-to-follow guide on how to audit websites? Well bookmark this page, because here is everything you need to know.

We’ll explain why website audits matter, identify some common goals, and show you a step-by-step process for executing them (the CAPRI framework).

By the end of this guide, you’ll be a website auditing wizard, ready to dive into projects big or small. Let’s get started.

Contents

Why are website audits so important?

Imagine that some years ago you built a perfect hotel for vacationers to have a relaxing and enjoyable stay in. The building work was impeccable, the rooms were adequately sized and thoughtfully laid out, and the decoration was dazzlingly stylish. Everything was ideal, your guests had a great time, and nothing could be improved!

Well, what if over the years you forgot to check if everything was still suitable? The needs of your guests changed, there’s not enough space anymore, the plumbing got leaky, and your once-stylish trimmings became dowdy years ago. Things started to fall in disarray and hotel visitor numbers started to decline.

If it’s not being assessed and monitored, your website could end up in ruin like my poorly-maintained hotel! In today’s vast digital world, it’s crucial to provide the highest quality website experience possible, or else potential visitors and customers could leave and seek out other businesses.

Website audits ensure you catch any problems, locate potential to grow even more, and create prioritized action plans to get improvements made effectively.

Ultimately, these audits keep you on track to achieve your digital goals, whether that’s new revenue, more visitors, brand loyalty, or whichever KPI needs attention.

Defining your website audit goal

Later on, I’ll be detailing a comprehensive audit process to get you started. It’s worth knowing that every audit you create and present should be customized to the recipient’s expertise and role, the website’s size (larger websites can take a lot longer to fully audit) and what the domain’s primary purpose is (what is important for an online shop isn’t always necessary for a magazine, for example).

Another huge factor that impacts what kind of audit you’ll be running is the expectations of your client or stakeholder. Understanding this at a very early stage is paramount, as it will determine how long you need and what focus should be taken.

Express Evaluation 🔎

This type of audit is perfect if the recipient is a new client/stakeholder who isn’t so skilled in the ways of digital marketing or web development. A quick website evaluation involves taking a speedy glance at content and technical assets to get a better idea of which area or pillar makes the most sense to focus on in another deeper analysis.

SEO Survey 🤖

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audits are necessary for domains that wish to gain more traffic and revenue via organic search results. Ranking in popular Search Engines like Google requires being a relevant and high-quality resource, while also making sure content is easily accessible by analyzing crawlers and bots.

Therefore these types of audits cover a multitude of topics, ranging from keyword research to search performance analytics, content quality checks, technical status, and more.

Content Control 📝

Content (words, images, videos etc) that you host on your website gives you a better chance of resonating with your ideal audience, and builds up a relationship that can result in more incoming traffic and customers.

Content Control audits therefore involve keyword and topic research to uncover gaps not yet targeted, and assess the quality of existing resources to locate any necessary improvements.

Performance Proof ⚡

This audit specifically makes sure that all assets and resources on your website are fast, stable, and functional. Slow pages cause frustration for users and result in high exit rates and low conversions.

Accessibility Analysis ♿

Making your web pages accessible for all is important for the good of your incoming visitors, as well as for the state of the web. It ensures that anyone can use your website, no matter their ability, preferred device, location, or language.

Website UX Discovery 🌈

For established domains that are eager to achieve more success online, a holistic Website UX discovery audit can be an ideal action to take, as it focuses on the 6 core pillars of optimal websites: SEO, Quality Assurance, Performance, Accessibility, Compliance, and Sustainability.

A simple step-by-step plan for your website audit

In this section I’d like to guide you through a simple framework for creating comprehensive and focused website analyses, and I’ve named it the CAPRI Framework.

Let’s dig into each of those steps below so that you can master their individual steps!

1. Crawling your website

Crawling is a process carried out by Search Engine bots and site analysis tools (like Ryte!) in order to analyze many aspects of a website, from its style and content, to its technical behaviour and the way it’s all linked together.

How to start a website crawl:

  1. Choose your favourite website crawler. Mine is Ryte of course, but there are others available such as Screaming Frog and Sitebulb (which crawl locally) or DeepCrawl.

  2. Enter your exact homepage address, including the right protocol (e.g. https://) and subdomain (e.g. www.).

  3. Select mobile or desktop crawling, depending on the type of audit you’d like to run.

  4. Configure the crawler’s basic settings based on the site’s technical set-up.

  5. (Advanced) Set up advanced settings and choose which parts of your website to exclude from the crawl.

  6. Start the crawl!

2. Assessing the results

When the crawling has finished, you’ll receive a quick report summarizing the key learnings it detected.

The next best place to start in Ryte is the Issues Overview, which prioritizes optimizations based on how impactful they will be for the site’s current health.

Here are some of the most common yet frustrating issues to be investigated when assessing the crawl results:

Issue name Description Potential fix
Duplicate Content Duplicate and near duplicate content can confuse users and reduce organic rankings. Merge the content on the best performing page and redirect the duplicates to the original page version.
Unoptimized titles and descriptions Meta titles and descriptions help users find your content in search result pages. Provide a unique title and description for each page that deserves to rank.
Broken images and missing alt tags Content is important for many reasons, so when images break, it can kill a user experience. Ensure images still exist and provide descriptive alt text for images either directly in the HTML or in your Content Management System.
Weak internal linking structure A clear and logical site structure enables users to discover pages easily. Work towards having a well-structured content hierarchy and internal linking elements.
Slow, clunky pages Having a fast website is crucial to avoid losing customers. Use performance reports to find slow pages, compress large images, and keep your CMS up-to-date.

Optimizing websites costs time and resources, so you need to really pick your battles here

3. Prioritizing fixes and optimizations

In this third step, we’re going to turn our list of results into a structured audit report that clients can effectively work with. You will have already started prioritizing issues based on hints from Ryte, but we’re going to prioritize the prioritizations!

4. Recommending changes to primary stakeholders

By now you should have a lovely prioritized list of tasks for your website to succeed, but it’s not quite a fully fledged audit yet. You need to plan out all potential solutions and suggest them in order of impact and effort required.

5. Implementing and measuring the results

Because of your outstanding audit, fixes and changes will start rolling out. To effectively do this, you need to document each major website improvement in a relevant format.

Final thoughts on how to succeed

There is no “single best way” to audit a website. Investigations can range from very quick checks to really in-depth analyses. However, some key factors to remember that every good audit needs to be are:

If you follow these guiding points, you’ll become a website auditing professional in no time!