How to Audit Your Website

When was the last time you updated your website?

Last week I talked about giving your business a mid-year check up. And while I touched briefly on updating your website, I didn’t go into a whole lot of depth on the subject. But don’t worry: we’re going in-depth today. Why?

Your website cannot be stagnant.

As your business grows and changes your website needs to change with it. You need to keep up with the style of your industry, the style of the internet, the way people use websites. Updating your website makes you business look current, modern, and easy to work with. It makes your products and services more appealing. It makes visitors more interested in you.

Convinced? Great! I knew you would be. But now you have to figure out what to actually update… and that may seem a little overwhelming.

Don’t worry! I’m going to tell you, step by step, how to figure out what needs to change on your website. And luckily, it’s a pretty straightforward process… but it does require a lot of time and some brutal honesty with yourself. In the end, though, I promise it will be worth it.

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If you know you need to update your website, the best way to identify all the areas that need improvement is with a website audit.

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Pages

Start with a broad overview of the pages on your website. Ask yourself:

• Are there any pages missing? Have you been thinking about adding pages that would improve your site or help visitors?
• Are there any unnecessary pages? Are there pages for old services or ones that contain redundant information?
• Do the page titles make sense? Will visitors know where to find the information they’re looking for?

Make a list of all your thoughts as you go through the site. If there are pages that you think should be added, take some time to brainstorm content for them. If you found some unnecessary pages, decide whether they need to be rewritten or deleted entirely. If any of the page titles are unclear or misleading, decide on new titles that will make navigating through your site easier.

Design

If you haven’t updated your website in a while, an audit is a good time to look at the overall design and formatting. Ask yourself:

• Does your website look too busy? You may need to limit your color scheme and add in more whitespace.
• Does it look similar to other websites in your industry? You don’t want to copy anyone else’s website, but you should have a similar feel in order to come across as current and up-to-date.
• Does it look professional? You don’t have to hire an expensive web designer. But your site should look like you invested some time, thought and funds into it. After all, if you’re not willing to spend money on your business, no one else will be either.
• Is your website mobile-responsive? More than 50% of all web traffic is mobile these days. You need to make sure these visitors have a good experience too.

Content

Editing content is probably the longest part of a website audit.

Start by checking the actual information in your content. Read it out loud to make sure you know how it actually sounds and what it says. Ask yourself:

• Does the information on this page match the page title?
• Is this helpful to my visitors?
• Does the content on this page make sense if you don’t already know about my business?
• Does this information answer some question or provide a way to fix a problem?
• Am I using good on-page SEO practices? Are you adding in keywords while keeping your content clear and easy to read?

If any of the answers to those questions are no, plan to do some rewriting until your content is clear, informative, and helpful.

Next, you need to edit the style of your content. You want your content to be concise, consistent, and easy to read, so look for:

• A consistent style. Is the tone conversational or clinical? In first person or third? Make sure you’re not changing between pages.
• Crispness. Does the content on this page get to the point without rambling or sharing unnecessary information? Are you using five syllable words when there’s a perfectly good two syllable word available? Cut down any unnecessary or rambling content.
• Formatting. Do you use headers, images, and graphics? Are they the same style on each page? If not, edit to make sure your formatting is consistent.
• Readability. Do you have long blocks of text? Try breaking them up into shorter paragraphs of only 2-4 sentences. Add in headers, images, graphics, and lists to divide things further.

Be sure to include your blog posts in this stage of the audit!

If you have a blog on your website, there’s a good chance you’ve improved your style over time. You may have started creating custom images in a certain style, using headers in a certain color, or handling links a certain way. All these changes are great — but you need to go back to your old posts and check if they are stylistically consistent as well.

Finally, what is perhaps the most essential part of editing content: proofreading.

Your website is the face of your business, so you need to make sure there are no errors on there making you look bad!  Some of the most common ones I’ve seen are are:

• Unnecessary capitalization. If it’s not the first word of a sentence, a proper noun, or a title, it shouldn’t be capitalized.
• Spelling errors. Pretty self-explanatory. If you’re not sure of the spelling, look it up.
• Homonyms. They’re, their, there, your, you’re, it’s, its, to, two, too… It’s really easy to use the wrong one. Make sure every word you use is correct.
• Extra words or dangling sentences. If you’ve ever gone through and changed your content, it’s easy to leave behind a word or part of a sentence that you meant to delete. Check that every part of your content is supposed to be there.
• Poor grammar. Switching tenses, weird sentence construction, incorrect comma uses… It all makes your business look bad, and it should all be fixed. The exception to this is colloquial writing, where you write the way you talk even if it is not 100% grammatically correct.

Often, we’re so used to reading our own websites that we read right over spelling and grammar errors, so you may need a second set of eyes to catch these. And if you’re not a native speaker of the language your website is in, hire someone who is to help you proofread. They are much more likely to catch grammatical errors.

Links & Buttons

This part of the audit is incredibly straightforward… and incredibly time-consuming. Which is why so many people skip it.

You need to go through every page of your website, click on every link and button, and make sure that they all take you where they’re meant to.

If, for example, you have a button that is supposed to take visitors to your blog, but instead it takes them to your contact page, they are going to be annoyed. It’s a short step from annoyance to a negative opinion of your website and your business. That’s why it’s critical to make sure everything goes to the right place.

There is software out there that will check your site for dead or broken links that go nowhere. But software doesn’t know where every link is supposed to go. People can tell, though, if a link goes where it’s supposed to, so a person needs to be the one to check.

Yes, checking all your links and buttons takes a long time. But every so often, it needs to be done.

Dead Pages

Finally, you need to go through every page on your website and look for dead pages.

A dead page is on that goes nowhere. It’s not part of your sales funnel. It doesn’t link to anything else. It doesn’t encourage visitors to continue on through your website. When a visitor gets to the end of a dead page, there are no next steps. It just ends, and they have no where to go.

This is bad for your website and bad for your business.

Every page needs to lead somewhere else — to another blog post, to a list of your services, to a PayPal page where they can buy your services. Where it goes is up to you, but it needs to go somewhere. And no, having a top or bottom menu on your page doesn’t count — it’s the content of the individual page that’s important. Make each page leads somewhere else.

Yes, auditing your website is a long process. But your visitors — and your business! — will thank you for it.

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Know your website needs an audit but don’t have the time? I feel ya — and I’ve got your solution right here!

P.S. – 6 website mistakes you’re probably making + 11 ways to make your blog posts more awesome