Website Audit Checklist To Boost Your Site Performance (PDF Included)

I’m glad that you are looking for the best Website audit checklist to evaluate and improve the technical performance of your business site!

Well! You have reached the right place!

Let’s start from the basics!

The website audit can be defined as the process of a detailed analysis of the performance of your webpage before undertaking the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies.

Every business or website owner ought to understand the specific keywords that drive the quality traffic to your website, what content generates the leads, why are you missing the conversions, etc. all these are measured and identified during the website audit.

With the help of this website assessment checklist, you might encounter issues that need fixes and also require assistance or suggestions from the SEO expert or web developer.

If you have never done a website audit, or it’s been more than six months you have audited your website, or if you depend on guesswork with your website then a proper audit actionable plan or a professional website technical audit checklist is what you need.

A good SEO audit will disclose the ways to keep your website up-to-date with all the latest modifications and developments to make sure you are top in the SEO game.

Below I have provided you with the go-to website audit checklist 2020 to ensure that your website is all updated and set up for best performance.

So, without any further ado, let’s get started!

How To Do A Website Audit?

The websites never stay constant, they grow, they change continuously, which makes things difficult for the business owners to keep their updates and information modifications in line.

Besides, the changes within pages, the SEO needs to ensure the adjustments are properly made and updated for the search engines and audience.

Having a website audit checklist will ensure the proper modifications and functioning of your SEO strategy. Also, with an appropriate website audit, you will rest assured of driving qualified traffic to your website.

A proper and intensive online website audit involves performing operations on specialized frameworks.

Below is the prescribed website SEO audit checklist you can consider to improve your online visibility.

1. HTML Header

The header tags are the first impression makers or the elements that fetch you traffic just by the brief of your web page you provide your users through it

Title Tag

The titles of the pages will let the users and the search engines know the subject of the webpage. They also help the search engines predict the relevancy of the page to a user’s search query. Therefore, the page titles make the important factor to be found in the top search results. Make sure the title is accurate and relevant to the content of the page as much as possible.

Meta Description Tag

Like the title tag, the meta description implies the same aspects. It needs to be as relevant as possible. Keep the description between 70 – 300 characters and try to convey the information about your page in a simple, short, and crisp paragraph.

2. Body Content

Your content and its representation play a vital role. Here are a few elements that need consideration when you are auditing your web page content.

Header Tags

The very first element to get noticed on your page would be the header tag. Through these headers, you can highlight the important content topics of your page to your user as well as to the search engines. The main title of your page should always be in the H1 tag and the rest in H2 and accordingly.

Keyword Consistency

The whole content on your page should be focused on specific keywords. The keywords here play the main role, so make sure you worked out the whole keyword research before planning out the content. A good spread of keywords across the page, titles, and tags would be an ideal approach.

Amount Of Content

Basically, the amount of content always depends on the topic. The dimensions of your textual content will assist your website in search rankings. Make sure you are not too heavy or too light on the ground when it comes to the textual content. Set a bar of a minimum of 1000 words of textual content on your page.

Image Alt Attributes

This might not seem necessary, but it is. The Alt tags can be easily added via CMS. The Alt text describes the appearance and content of an image on the page. Alt text becomes necessary for visually impaired users who use screen readers. Also, if your image doesn’t load for some reason, the alt tag will display instead of the broken image. They also provide better image context to the search engines helping them in indexing the image accurately.

3. Links

Links are the associations or re-directions to different web pages ( internal or external) that drive traffic to the relevant pages on your website or another website.

Number Of Backlinks

Backlinks are another important metric in search engine rankings. But unlike the amount of text, it is about quality over quantity. When dealing with the backlinks, you need to look for partnerships and consider guest posts.

The more your website is active and authoritative, the more websites will like to link to you. With this, you can also have a glance at what your competition is and what they score.

On-Page Link Structure

On a webpage, it is always good to have both internal links and external links. Try linking relevant internal pages and external resources your users might find useful when reading your content.

Broken Links

Make sure your user never leads to seeing a 404 page. Your webpage may have broken links or links that no longer exist and needs redirecting to the new pages.

The broken internal and outbound links can be managed, but the broken inbound links that link from another website to your website are out of your control. So, you need to set up a 301 direct to drive that traffic to any of your most relevant pages.

4. Other SEO Factors To look

When you have a website consisting of data dimensions, blogs, etc., there are various backend aspects you need to consider such as

Robots.txt

When the web bots crawl on your site, the robots.txt file tells them which pages to crawl and which pages not to crawl. One of the quickest ways to test this is to type ‘/robots.txt’ after the domain name and see what pops up.

XML Sitemaps

The Sitemaps contains the list of pages accessible for crawling, also the information for search engines like last updated pages, the priority of pages, etc.,

Analytics

You should be using some form of analytics tool to keep track of your metrics and progress. The most notable tool is Google Analytics, which is free and easy to set up and use.

5. Performance

Besides, the content on your web page and links, the foremost element that improves your search engine ranking is performance.

Page Speed

The page speed has a substantial impact on the user experience. The average page loading time is 4 seconds, but do aim for 1.5 seconds if possible. The page loading speed affects the bounce rates and is a factor in search rankings.

Server Response Time

The server response time varies depending on the geolocation or hosting. Most of the time, budget hosting leads to slow response times. So if your business is located in the US and the majority of your customers are from the US then having a US-based hosting provider would be best. You also have many tools available to check your response time.

Number Of Resources

More files to load will eventually increase the number of server requests, affecting the page load time and overall site speed. So, always remove unnecessary files such as styles and scripts.

Optimize Images

Right formatting and compressing images can have an impact on the page load performance. You have some free tools to get that correct formatting and compressing done for your images.

Minification

Minification can speed up resource loading time. It is the process of removing unnecessary characters from code without changing the functionality.

6. Security

Security makes an essential aspect when a user visits your webpage. The more your webpage is secured and certified, the more you are trusted by the visitors.

SSL

Google favors the websites that are SSL enabled, which makes having an SSL certificate no longer a consideration, it is a must to have a certificate installed. Most of the hosting companies now support the LetsEncrypt SSL (free service).

HTTPS Redirects

After the setup of your SSL certificate, make sure that your main URL is https:// version.

Malware Check

Make sure that your website code hasn’t been compromised and you are completely safe.

Email Privacy

It is always good to not have any email addresses as plain text throughout your content. A format such as ‘[email protected]’ would be an ideal one.

Importance Of Conducting A Website Audit

If you are a business owner and have a website then here are three important reasons why you need a website audit.

1. Ensures Proper User Experience For Visitors

When a visitor scrolls through your webpage and is driven to a 404 error then you will certainly see the visitor seeing down on your quality.

The missing pages and the broken links on your web pages are bad for your website. It is important to improve them or your competitors will gain the diversion of traffic towards them.

To ensure a proper and smooth user experience and abstain from disappointing your website guests, you will need to complete the website audit and test the following.

  • Find the low-quality links and redirect them to the most relevant ones you deem fit.
  • Check for any missing or 404 error pages.
  • Ensure there are no dysfunctional features especially in login pages, checkout pages, or a shopping cart if any.
  • Make sure to have the links to the privacy policy on every page.
  • Also ensure that every page on your website is advanced for SEO, through H1 header tag, proper anchor texts, optimized meat descriptions, alt tags on each picture, keywords in title and tags, and canonical links if required.

2. Ensures Data Protection

Your client or shopper on your website seeks the information protection they have provided when using your website. The information protection on a website must modify and develop in quality periodically.

As an essential feature of your audit checklist, you need to analyze if the gathering of the client information without the authorization would trade off the security. In advance, you will have to examine the solicitations to check regardless of the fact whether they contain any recognizable data.

The collection of PII or recognizable data like names, contact numbers, or addresses in your form without the security of breaching can violate the examination merchant’s terms of administration and will put the client’s information in danger.

Your website may have the tags you are unaware or ignorant of, and they may have conveyed their tags on your website. Finding these rebel tags and checking for PII can require more testing and requires the same attention as other tags on your website.

In such cases, the automation can be a form of rescue, or say the closest companion. With this, you can ensure information protection at a large scale

3. Helps Find Broken Tags

The fate of your website depends on the examination and computerized advertising tools. They quantify website movement and relatively improves the user experience. These improvements or say, website tags increase the traffic significantly.

But, the tag breaks cause the website examination, publicizing to separate eventually creating problems in driving the traffic to your website. So, your website must have an audit checklist that incorporates the auditing of tags and functionalities implied by those tags.

Here are a few ways to do that.

  • Make use of the program’s dev tools to look over every page’s code and check if each tag is available and conveying the correct information. This technique is considered to be an exceptional manual procedure that can subject to human errors or blunders.
  • Make use of the tag debugger in order to parse the system demands sent by the website page and find out the tags on your page. This technique is free and spares you some time from checking the system demands yourself. On a contrary note, this strategy may not be feasible on the off chance that your website is substantial and undergoes continual changes.
  • Make use of a tag examining device that finds tagging mistakes. This strategy of tag examining is significantly more reasonable than any of the other ways.

Among the three ways, you can incorporate to find the broken tags, the third way of using a device for tag examining proves to be the best and it can likewise test for the issues with SEO.

4. Improves Technical SEO And Performance

SEO is a much broader term and requires more focus on user experience. With website auditing also involves the analysis of website performance based on the metrics such as loading time, activity time on a website, social sharing, etc. all these are the contributing factors of your website ranking.

Practicing and sticking to the white-hat SEO will ensure the safety of your website’s performance from the ever-changing search engine algorithms.

5. Ensures The Website’s Effectiveness

The effectiveness of a website is a whole term that defines the goals of a website. Through website auditing, you can track your ultimate goals, and achieve them effectively.

Website auditing ensures if your landing pages are converting, is the website easy to use, and are the visitors finding it easy to navigate around your website to find their piece of purpose and/or information.

Website Audit Summary

Now that you know how important a proper website audit is, the above website audit checklist may help you right with your auditing. You can even hire an expert or developer to portray your website in the best possible way on the internet. A good audit should incorporate the tools that will help you perform the following.

  • In comparing with the competitors and make proper use of your score finding.
  • In identifying the necessary modifications and the best possible way to do them.
  • To have a glance at the general overview of the SEO performance of your website.
  • In analyzing the drawbacks of your website and overcoming them.
  • In setting up the goals for future enhancements and achieving them.

While the above website audit checklist will have you covered with all the necessary test cases for better search engine ranking, incorporating a tool that can make more out of your effective strategies is always a better complement in website auditing. One such tool you can look forward to is SEMrush.

SEMRush – The Best Site Audit SEO Tool

SEMrush is one of the best website audit tools that satisfy all your SEO auditing needs from keyword research to backlinking opportunities. It is the most trusted SEO tool all over the world, used for any size of business.

There are ways SEMrush can help you with your website auditing. Below are a few of them!

1. The keyword research is probably the bedrock strategy for driving the traffic towards you. SEMrush equips you with SEO intelligence and helps you with effective keyword research and content optimization.

2. Competitive intelligence is an important factor to consider for any business. SEMrush has you covered with all the stats you will need to analyze your performance and find key points to enhance your strategies. SEMrush will provide you with periodic reports of your progress, traffic, also source (paid or organic).

3. Panda updates are the essential content filter of Google’s algorithm. SEMrush will perform the site audits and identifies the elements that can get hit by the Panda. So, that you can modify them accordingly and make sure all the loopholes are addressed at the earliest.

4. Links are the currency in the internet world. So, you need to have your link-building strategy in place. SEMrush will help you find where your competitors get their links from and the number of backlinks they have. It also provides you with information about how many high-quality links any website has to help you design a more effective backlink strategy for your website.

5. SEMrush will help you find better advertising opportunities on your website. With this tool, you can research your website and consider guest blogging that can be beneficial for you.

So, on the whole, SEMrush arms you with a wide range of features and functions you can use to keep your website updated and improve your search engine ranking as well as the traffic through website content and SEO audit.

Bottom Line

Let’s hope I brought immense value to your search for a website audit checklist. By following the website audit template, you will make sure every corner of your website is optimized and attracts traffic as well as the website crawlers.

The aforementioned pointers will get you around auditing your website swiftly. These will also help you figure out the points where your website lacks in terms of SEO and equips you with the strategies to overcome them.

And finally, if you are looking for the website audit checklist pdf and here is the download link for you! So, if you are wondering, how to audit your website, you can use the PDF checklist and ensure that you are implementing the best practices to tweak your site performance.

by Nirmala
Nirmala is an avid blogger, WordPress enthusiast who has been blogging since 2010. She loves to write useful WP tips & tricks on this active blog.

4 thoughts on “Website Audit Checklist To Boost Your Site Performance (PDF Included)”

  1. Thank you so much for sharing a valuable post and PDF . It will be helpful for me while auditing my site myself.

    Cheers,

    Reply
  2. Thank you so much for sharing a valuable post and PDF . It will be helpful for me while auditing my site myself. and amzing content.

    Reply

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