The first step to best website design: What is a website audit?
Imagine you’re sitting down to date night. You’ve both been busy with work, somehow together every evening without feeling “present,” and you feel like it’s time to check in with each other.
How are you both feeling?
Are you both still working towards the same goals?
Is there anything that could be better?
Well, a website audit is doing the same thing for your website, when you take a step back and investigate your website from all angles, which may include:
- Website performance: Is your website loading quickly? Are there any broken pages or links?
- Website content: Is your content relevant or are people leaving your website quickly?
- Website SEO: Is all your meta copy correct? Are you using relevant keywords?
- Website security: Is your website safe to use? Can you protect sensitive data?
- Website compliance: Are you following the latest updates in legal policies?
After carrying out our own website audit, here are a few areas that we felt deserved a bit more love, getting our website back to its digital best.
Keeping on top of these things means there’s never a need for petrol station apology flowers. Phew.
1. Website Cookies Policy: A relationship built on honesty.
Getting it wrong is equivalent to: Waiting until you’re already living together to discuss whether you both want kids. You need to be clear about what you want up-front so someone can decide how they want to go forward. Maybe compromise and get cats?
What do website cookies do?
There are several types of Internet cookies, but we’re going to focus on HTTP cookies.
HTTP website cookies track a person when they’re using a website, allowing that website to remember information that will make future visits more convenient, such as auto-filling website logins or serving up personalised content based on previous searches.
Although they’re incredibly useful for marketers and customers alike, they also contain sensitive data that some people would prefer to keep to themselves.
What we found:
Cookie and privacy laws have both evolved and we need to keep up, something which a lot of websites may not be doing as cookies feel like such a small part of their overall website.
It’s time that cliché got dunked, because cookies are a crucial part of your website’s overall security and compliance.
How we’ll improve it:
To update our cookies processes and policies to full compliance involves two key steps:
- Classifying our use of data and cookies across the site—it needs to be clear to all what data your website tracks, how it’s used, and how it’s stored.
- Adding in a cookie popup that allows users to manage what cookies are active on the site alongside a full explanation of how we’ll use them—imagine this as the customer-facing side of cookies.
2. Website Security Audit: Less insecurities of someone stealing us away.
Getting it wrong is equivalent to: Leaving Tinder on your phone even after you’ve been dating for months. Making someone feel secure needs ongoing actions that show them there’s no chance of someone else hacking their way into your heart.
What is website vulnerability?
A website vulnerability is a weakness in your website that may allow someone or something with malicious intent—such as a hacker or virus—to gain access to your website in some way, whether it’s your data or hosting server.
What we found:
We use a website scanner to check websites for issues, such as outdated scripts or software on the server, highlighting anything that needs updating to keep it secure.
As websites are served through a stack of technology—meaning they are built of many different applications—they need to be checked regularly to ensure they have the latest updates and that any security issues are fixed.
This includes the website itself and the server it is hosted on, meaning you’ll often find updates worth making for the performance and security of your website, as we did in only 23 seconds.
How we’ll improve it:
With the website scanner producing a full report of known issues it finds, we simply update all the packages and software flagged across the server and site until we’re happy that our website is no longer vulnerable.
3. Optimising Website Speed: Never late on date night.
Getting it wrong is equivalent to: Remembering your anniversary the day afterwards. Awkward. If you’re too slow to give the person the attention they deserve, they might start looking elsewhere…
What is website speed?
Website speed is measured in multiple ways, but it all comes back to the time it takes for someone to load and use your website.
The main thing is to ensure the site is working correctly from a user perspective, with pages loading quickly for a smooth user experience.
What is fully interactive website speed?
Fully interactive website speed, also known as Time To Interactive (TTI), is the amount of time a website takes to get to a point where the user can interact with it.
For example, if a clickable image loads and it isn’t yet clickable, this can create a frustrating experience for the user.
What we found:
Our website speed audit revealed that we could speed up our TTI with a few simple tweaks.
For context, a “good” time from Google’s point of view is 0-3.8 seconds, so you want a website that’s snappy.
How we’ll improve website speed:
There are so many ways to improve website speed, including:
- Resizing images with modern formats, such as AVIF, for higher compression.
- Minifying files and back-end scripts.
- Removing unnecessary JavaScript (used to create interactivity on a website).
- Reducing server response times.
- Changing GIFs to video.
For all the possible tips and tricks, go straight to the source. Here’s where Google shares all the ways you could increase your website’s speed and performance.
Website speed is so important that we’ve written about it before, so read our blog on Why Website Speed Really Matters.
However, speed is not the only indicator of a good website, so remember not to chase speed at the expense of your user experience.
4. UX Website Audit: Love comes from the little things.
Getting it wrong is equivalent to: Turning up to your first date with toilet roll stuck to your shoe. It’s a small detail, but one that they’ll remember when they’re telling their friends.
What is website UX?
Website UX is the user experience (UX) someone has on your website. It refers to how easy and intuitive your website is to use. Can they find what they were looking for without any struggles? That’s the main goal.
What is a Twitter share link?
A Twitter share link is when you share something directly from a website, such as a blog, to Twitter. This allows other people to hear about this website page or content and click on the link that’s been shared.
What we found:
This one is pretty simple… No image was being pulled through with our Twitter share link, which makes the user experience feel less polished.
Best website design takes every detail into account, making all touchpoints equally important, from website performance to social sharing.
How we’ll improve it:
Since we use WordPress for our content management system (CMS), we’ll check whether there have been any updates made to the social sharing plug-in and go from there.
5. Website SEO Audit & Website Content Audit: Sweet nothings they long to hear.
Getting it wrong is equivalent to: Using all the wrong words to describe your new partner because your ex used to love them. Heads up: Babe and Bae are out, snookums is in.
What is website SEO?
Website search engine optimisation (SEO) means how easily someone can find your website when they begin their search for a product or service. This takes a lot of different forms, but may include:
- Including keywords that people will use in their search.
- Page structure that suggests a thought-out, easy to understand web page.
- Topic authority: Do you have multiple pages on a certain topic?
- Affiliate links: Are people linking to you as an expert in this area?
What is website content:
Website content is anything a user can see or read when they visit a website, from the headlines to the main information to the calls to action.
There is also website content that users can’t see, such as meta copy, which blurs the line between SEO and content with meta titles, descriptions, alt text and more.
What we found:
Our full SEO web audit revealed areas worth improving to increase our website’s ranking in search engines. Some of these areas included:
- Missing title tags.
- Duplicate content.
- Pages that users may struggle to find.
Over time, as your website grows or updates, it’s important to check over these seemingly invisible issues. Although they may rarely impact your user’s journey, they will impact how well you rank in search engines, reducing your overall web traffic.
How we’ll improve it:
We’ll go through any issues flagged by our SEO and make the changes needed, whether that’s including more internal links between website pages to keep people on the website for longer or editing meta copy to avoid duplication.
Ready to give your own website some love?
If there’s one thing we hope you take away from this lovey-dovey website blog, it’s that you should approach your website like a relationship—just because you see it every day, it doesn’t mean everything is perfect.
Keep checking to make sure you’re on the same page, whether that means a few quick fixes to reduce insecurities, quarterly date nights to check you’re both going the same speed, and an eye on other happy couples for any inspiration you need to keep that spark going.
Ready to give your own website some love?