A website audit will provide you with a comprehensive assessment of how well your website is performing and how it can be improved in order to drive more traffic to your site, increase conversions, boost site performance and improve the user experience (UX).
If you’ve never conducted a website audit, or you’re planning on optimising your website, the KIJO team have put together a thorough website audit checklist for you to peruse, refer to, and properly get to grips with why an audit is essential for preserving your website’s performance.
A website audit is an in-depth examination of a website before a redesign or optimisation takes place. It can help determine where a website is falling flat in terms of its goals and targets, and thus indicate where improvements can be made and efforts should be focused on.
At KIJO, we offer our own Website optimisation service – KIJO Optimise. This is a monthly service that provides you with a complete overview of your site’s performance and identifies key optimisation opportunities. You can read more here.
The best thing about a website audit is that it doesn’t have to cost a thing, but they do take time and effort to conduct yourself. At KIJO, we offer a free website audit that comprehensively reviews 113 website data points! Our skilled, experienced team will perform a complimentary deep dive which will evaluate your website’s performance, UX, traffic and conversions. Check out our free website audit offering here.
The benefits of a website audit include:
Performance
User Experience (UX)
Website SEO (Traffic)
Conversions
As well as,
In summary, a website audit can provide everything you need to implement a proper optimisation strategy.
There are a few different types of website audits that we focus on here at KIJO as part of our KIJO Optimise package. They are:
At KIJO, our Performance audit involves leveraging Google Lighthouse. The Google Lighthouse tool assesses how quickly your site loads and how fast key elements of the page become available to a user. We use it to conduct comprehensive checks on performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. We take the scores Google Lighthouse assigns across these 4 metrics and develop a list of actions to improve all of these scores. The ideal score is anything over 90+.
You can read more on the brilliance of Google Lighthouse here.
As part of our UX audit, we conduct an in-depth analysis of user experience across multiple devices, ensuring seamless user journeys and consistent design integrity. We’ll assess how long your users are spending on your site per visit month by month, along with your site’s bounce rates. We put together an analysis of the user journey, experience, the navigational structure and compare all new content to the website design system.
At KIJO, we utilise Ahrefs (an SEO software suite that contains tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking and site audits) Google Search Console (a service offered by Google that helps one monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot a site’s presence in Google Search results) and other SEO tools to carry out a deep dive into a site’s and its competitors traffic & SEO. We’ll look to provide or identify:
Our conversion audit aims to transform insights into tangible outcomes. The KIJO conversion report provides a 10-step approach to elevate website conversions and includes a detailed review of the conversion process, a deep dive into the user journey/conversion funnels, and an analysis of any drop-off points and potential leaks.
If you think you’re capable of auditing your website yourself, here are the basic steps to take:
You need to use a tool to help you analyse how your website is performing. As mentioned above, we use Google Lighthouse which provides not only a comprehensive look at your website’s current performance but also gives you insights on how to improve it. Read up on how to Master Google Lighthouse here.
A site error – like if a link is broken, missing H1 tags, incomplete meta descriptions or missing ALT tags – can drastically affect your user’s experience of your site as well as cause Google to rank it lower on its pages. If a link is broken, it will most likely cause users to close the window and visit a competitor. So, finding errors like these can help minimise bounce rates and boost conversions.
When conducting a website audit, you need to ask yourself when the last time you updated your content was. When did you last check which keywords your site is ranking for on search engines too? Make sure to analyse and revisit meta descriptions, alt text on images, H1s and H2s. As mentioned, we use a combination of Google Lighthouse, the WordPress SEO PlugIn Yoast, Google Search Console and Ahrefs to identify where a website might be falling down in regards to SEO.
It’s time to ask yourself whether the design of your site is really working for your customers? You could look at a software like HotJar which offers heat maps of your site. These identify which parts of your website are holding the most attention and can reveal how your UX is impacting your users.
A website audit should absolutely include any and all content on your pages. This means images, blogs, infographics, news articles, and the website page copy itself. Are these pages ranking at all in search engines? Is your current on page SEO drawing the desired and expected traffic results? These are the main questions to ask of your content during a website audit.
As part of the KIJO Optimise package, this is what our analysis results in; a comprehensive report that outlines the site issues identified and what to do about them. An in-depth report like this is invaluable and whilst there are auditing tools out there to be found and are workable, collaborating with an experienced, expert company like KIJO is really the way to go. Working directly with a team that has a fountain of knowledge to properly understand and clearly highlight what changes actually need to be made in order to see improvement on your website, is truly a money-can’t-buy investment.
When conducting your website audit, here are some key questions to ask of it in each audit type. You’ll notice that there’s a lot of cross over in performance and user experience, so we’ve put these together:
You can read our article on Conversion Rate Optimisation tips here.
We recently conducted an audit for our brilliant clients Holyrood Distillery. The KIJO team looked at their existing website and analysed it with our comprehensive audit structure. We could then create an educated action plan for our new design and then, after implementation, properly compare these results with their new KIJO designed website scores.
Leveraging Google Lighthouse, we discovered that the existing website was scoring 85/100. Performance scored the lowest at 63/100. Ideally, you want a score of 90+ across all of the Google Lighthouse markers. So, we knew that Performance should be a key focus for the new website because of this audit result.
When we audit the user experience at KIJO, we analyse 51 different data points. For Holyrood Distillery, we noted their score was 68/100 which isn’t bad, but not fantastic. As you can see, engagement scored 0 which, for us, is an unsettling score. So, user engagement became a key area we needed to focus on bolstering in our new design.
Using Ahrefs and Google Search Console we analyse traffic scores over 7 data points. Our website audit concluded that Holyrood’s overall traffic score was 43/100 – not ideal! The team noted that there was absolutely no content marketing present on their current website and content marketing can greatly improve traffic. We also registered that keywords weren’t being utilised in an optimal way in copy across the site. So, we knew where to focus our efforts here because of these audit insights.
KIJO’s conversion audit looks at a further 43 data points and of Holyrood’s previous website, we gathered a score of 66/100. There were some data points we didn’t have access to which thus rendered a score of 0, but our lowest measurable score was the site’s checkout process. So, from the audit, we knew we had to focus on minimising drop-offs here and enhance the user journey which would ultimately ensure that they would click ‘pay now’.
When you’ve completed your website audit, the next step is to prioritise and put in order the changes that feel the most critical to you and your business – which ones are going to get you closer to meeting your goals faster?
Now, you’ll have actionable steps you can take to improve and optimise your website making it – and your business – a stronger competitor in this demanding digital age.
Alternatively, you can enquire with the KIJO team regarding the KIJO Optimise service that does all of this for you, saving important time and effort. You can read more on KIJO Optimise here.
