In spite of all the good work with an amazing design, SEO optimization, and use of the right keywords, your website is not doing well in terms of ranking, right? There is a problem with navigation and bounce rate as well. It’s time pals for the website audit – a process of assessment, analyzing, inspecting, and eventually reporting all the limitations and shortcomings in different aspects of a website. Like a business audit, a website audit will give you the opportunity to update your website and make it excel in user experience and performance.
Web designers and managers have different tools with which they analyze the performance and quality of a website but auditing your website is the best you can do to identify and solve the known and unknown issues. Your clients and website visitors will find it optimized for better performance while greatly improving the ranking of your website. As a guide to performing a website audit here are a few key points that you must always carefully consider. It will benefit you to be alert while the inspection is being done.
Design
An impressive design or layout of a website is very important to leave a lasting first impression of your website on the visitors. If it matches the expectation and business theme it is representing then visitors’ stay on a website can be prolonged. Website audit includes a design audit to evaluate appeal, compatibility, and optimization with different browsers and operating systems of the specified website. The other aspects that are judged are whether the images or graphics consume a lot of bandwidth and do the animations face flash player issues. These checks will give good information about the website speed as well.
Usability
A website that is purely made for clients and the goal is to convert visitors into potential customers must rate very high in usability. Usability parameters in a website audit will help the website administrators to estimate the count of people who can log in simultaneously, and navigate the website and how the count of simultaneous visitors affects speed and performance. Other things to be gauged as far as usability is concerned are ease of navigation and ease of downloading. For an e-commerce website, the number of concurrent users who can place orders or browse product catalogs will be valuable information to make an efficient and likable website. After you get a report on usability, you can take steps to provide resources or modify coding sections to offer the best to your clients.
Content
This is the most important issue taken care of in the process of a website audit. It will let you understand your target audience. You would get clues regarding the style of content required to make your website more effective and informative. The content of your website will be checked for all kinds of accuracy necessary for your website like grammar, spelling, and contextual correctness of the content.
Functionality
A website has both static and dynamic features that make it complete and worth visiting. Auditing a website is done to evaluate the dynamic features that make it interactive, easy, and useful. The suggestions after this evaluation will tell a website administrator to add contact forms, feedback forms, and discussion forums, perform internal link checking, usability on gadgets like mobiles or tablets, integration with Google Analytics, and remove login-related issues. In short, everything that the website is designed to do must be there.
Navigation
A website can be navigated through Menus or Buttons making them the key element of any website. The audit on navigation checks your site for placement of menus and buttons, and consistency of these elements in look, hierarchy, and functionality. You can expect a detailed report on the issues regarding the presentation style, count, and graphical aspects of these elements on the pages throughout the website. If the navigation is confusing or messy, you have a chance to improve it after a website audit.
Accessibility
A website is an interface that is open to every kind of visitor. You may also expect differently-abled people to visit your website. The audit check on your website will point out limitations that such people will face while using your website. This audit will give suggestions regarding the good use of tags, alternative text for images or videos, assigning labels to form elements, the right application of table headers, and the color combinations in the foreground and background to improve readability.
Coding
Coding is that aspect of a website that needs to be updated for different browsers and operating systems since they are regularly updated to give better functionality while removing the reported bugs. Every web developer faces a phase in his professional life when he has to update the scripts to make the website compatible with a range of updated browsers. This aspect of website audit will help him to identify and optimize the coding snippets to give a consistent and high-performing website.
Well, you must have realized that a website audit is essential since it touches all the aspects of a website to make it behave nicely under all conditions. In short, a website audit is a process that gives you an idea about the overall fitness of your website. Make it a regular activity in your website management duties.
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