Effective Website Auditing

If you’re looking to make significant changes to your website, an audit is the right place to start. Completing an audit will give you a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses of your site, budgetary needs, and priorities moving forward.

There are important factors to consider when completing an audit:

An effective CMS should be both efficient and user-friendly. If you aren’t presently delighted with your CMS, then something isn’t right.  An effective CMS should allow you to make changes to your website quickly. If you are experiencing productivity issues when dealing with your website then it may be that the build is not effective and you may need an upgrade.

The content in the CMS should be of the highest quality. It should be reviewed on a regular basis ensuring it is current, accurate and accessible for the viewer. Compile a content inventory. You may not want to focus on the entirety of your content, perhaps narrowing your focus down to pages with the highest volumes of traffic.

Once you have completed your inventory you will want to take a look at titles (important for SEO), your descriptions, your page views and the impact on your audience. Remove anything that isn’t working to ensure that any personalisation is effective. Check the content generally – is it outdated? Does it still fit your brand’s tone of voice? The same should be applied to any calls to action.

Whilst doing all of this, make sure to consider the audience of any content. Being able to answer concisely who the content is for, will help in the pursuit of individualised content.

Your content needs to be easy to navigate. User testing will tell you whether your architecture is effective. You may have outstanding content but it may be rendered useless without the appropriate architecture. Over the years, your website my have grown. This natural growth can cause the ease-of-use to dip and can push important content into the background. It may be the case that your architecture was never placing the emphasis on your most important content in the first place. The architect is the skeleton of your website, essential for function.

This leads to design. Beauty might be skin deep but design speaks volumes about your brand. Does your site look dated? Take a look at your competitors. Successful businesses are regularly updating or revamping their website.

Finally, your website should be reviewed from a technical standpoint. This can start with basic questions, reviewing things like bugs, stability, security etc. At some point, you will want to have an expert technically review your site.

Get in touch with Ethisys should you be thinking about significant changes to your website. Our expert teams of developers can deliver a project to match and exceed your expectations.