Performing a site audit: a list of key questions you might want to answer

Surface the problems and opportunities for your site

Site audits are great for improving your business performance and should be done on a regular basis. Whilst they may seem like a daunting labour intensive task, they don’t need to be. An audit can be as big or small as you need it to be. The point is that you’re continually looking for areas to improve.

One of these statements will most likely apply to you…

  1. You’re about to design and create a new ‘all singing all dancing’ site, it’s going to be tons better then the current version, right?
  2. You’ve just launched your new site and early results show a big increase on you KPIs, high fives all round.
  3. You launched your site a while ago, since then you’ve made tactical improvements to improve the customer journey and increase conversion.

Either way, a site audit is going to help you.

It will help you identify the successes of your current site so you know what to keep and protect.

It will help you surface the problems and what to fix.

It will help you build a business case for what content or functions to dump because you’ve tried it and it failed.

By performing an audit straight after your launch you can shout out about the successes but also build your roadmap for changes over the next six months. There’s no shame in this because no new build is perfect.

It will give you a wider perspective, allow you to take a look at the site as a whole, open new opportunities that you weren’t previously aware of.

Technology moves on, yesterday’s best practice might be the wrong approach today and it could be harming the performance of your site. A site audit will help uncover this.

Set aside time every four months

I recommend that you set aside a few days every 4 months minimum (that’s a long time) to perform a site audit. Depending on the size of the site it could take you as little as a day or two to perform your tests, answer those unanswered questions and write up a quick analysis that could form part of a business case to convince your stakeholders that changes are needed. You can also track your score and show the progress you’ve made since the last audit.

Creating sites is a complex business and requires continual revision and effort.

Broadly speaking…

When I’m performing an audit on an existing site I’m essentially looking to establish two things in many different ways…

  1. Understanding current customer behaviour, what are they doing on site, what task are they trying to fulfil.
  2. Where are the opportunities and bottlenecks to close.

Here is a list of questions you may want to ask. This is more for inspiration then a definitive list.

General facts and questions of behaviour

It’s good to define these upfront, they may not offer lots of insight but they need to be established so you have a good foundation to work from.

  • When are people visiting the site? (day of week and time of day)
    • Are there any patterns?
    • If so, why?
  • What devices are customers using and how does this affect what they do?
    • Look at top content pages or events for each device type segment.
  • Does time of day or week effect device behaviour?
    • Same question as above but again segment the data by device type.
  • What content do mobile, tablet and desktop customers favour?
    • What’s the commonality between all devices? This can be deemed as priority content.
  • How are customers finding the site?
    • How does this effect their engagement?
  • What’s bringing customers to the site?
    • Look at sources vs behaviour
    • Look at keywords vs behaviour

Findability

  • How easy is the site to find?
    • Try finding your site via google, both with brand terms and non brand terms (Tip: Make sure you’re not signed into Google or it might appear that you’re doing better then you actually are!)

  • Page performance vs keyword (Paid and organic)

  • How easy is it to find content once within the site?

#Internal site search

A good internal site search can be critical to a users overall impression of a website. Some users express a preference for finding content via search and most will look for content using a search feature if they’re struggling to find what they need using the standard navigation. Top keywords should be monitored and mapped against the most relevant result. Customer search terms can highlight gaps in content or navigational problems as well as a useful insight into opportunities to target a wider range of keywords.

  • Search keywords (internal site) vs behaviour
    • What are people searching for?
    • Why did they opt to search rather then use your navigation?
    • Are the results for you top search keywords appropriate?
  • Are customers using the internal search on particular pages?
    • Internal site search keywords are great for uncovering UX issues and customer needs
  • Does your internal search offer autocomplete / autosuggestions?

# Proximity

Content should be grouped logically and related content should be easily accessed from the relevant pages so that there is a natural progression to each users journey and they feel guided through your site.

  • Proximity of content, can I easily navigate to related content from one page to another?
  • How well grouped are navigation options?
  • Is there a natural progression from on page to another?

Content

Content is critical to any site’s performance for obvious reasons. In terms of SEO a site full of relevant and useful content will outperform (rank higher than) a site that doesn’t, increasing the sites organic traffic. Written content should be useful and specific to the pages subject, what do your users want? If visitors cannot find the information they’re looking for and expected to find on your site, they’ll find one that does.

  • Depth of pages vs engagement - Compare the amount of content on the page vs engagement factors such as time on page, bounce rates etc

  • Where do customers arrive? What are the landing pages?

  • How do these key landing pages perform? What is the bounce rate and measures of engagement

  • Are people searching once they arrive? If so, what for? Does their query get resolved?

  • Which pages are they searching on? This may indicate that content is missing and the page isn’t answering their questions.

  • What content are customers looking at? What are they not looking at?

  • Does the page content match the subject of the page?

  • Content depth - are some pages ‘light’ on content?

  • Is your content broken up to aid scanning with headings, lists and imagery?

  • Consider the priority of content on the page, is it right compared to your customer needs?

  • Is the priority content above the fold? If there is such a thing nowadays! The point is, is it clear and easily available.

Flow

  • What are the key flows and journeys on the site for your business? The ones you want them to take

  • What are the popular flows for your customers?

  • How do these measure against your goals?

Segmenting your traffic

I’ve found that simple segmentation can produce some surprising results. One of the simplest segmentations you can do is look at New vs Returning visitor behaviour. Are there any different patterns, user flows and engagement metrics such as bounce rates, time of page etc. This could lead to opportunities to tailer and target content based on different visitor groups.

Other simple segmentations that come out of the box with Google analytics is Source, try splitting out by organic vs direct etc, different referrals etc.

The segmentation possibilities are endless and some will be more relevant to you then others.

Reporting & analytics

Gaining statistical information and quantitative insights about your customer behaviour is critical to improving the performance of your site, enabling you to spot weaknesses or areas for improvement and subsequently measure the effect of changes made.

  • Review your reporting. How advanced are your reports? Do they offer insights and meaning? Too many businesses fail to report more then the basics, citing monthly increases in traffic as success which masks what’s really going on.

  • Do reports lead to actions and change? If not, what’s the point? Sometimes the problem is not with the site, use the audit to energise people and take action.

  • Are your analytics and tag management scripts firing correctly? You’d be surprised at how easy it is to screw this up, all the time you’re blissfully unaware and reporting incorrect figures.

  • Are you using the latest version of the tracking tags? You may be missing out on new features.

  • Have you enabled internal Site Search queries to be tracked?

  • Have you setup ‘Referral exclusions’ in Google analytics? This is where you exclude visits from particular domains etc, traffic that you know is not customers such as automated crawlers. We recently updated this for one of our businesses and found that it reduced our bounce rate by as much as 14%! We were performing much better then we thought.

  • Check webmaster tools, any issues to fix? You should do this and respond on a regular basis.

  • Have you setup event tracking for key actions such as click to call?

  • Are you tracking PDF downloads etc?

  • Have you setup goals?

  • Are your existing goals working properly?

  • Are you using advanced tools such as Heat mapping etc? Quite often you can take advantage of free trials, if you’ve not got the budget to use these full time, make use of the limited trial on your most important pages.

Speed & Page weight

We all know that page speed is very, very, very important. The most touted example is that Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. A slow site will lead to greater customer abandonment but it will also effect your search rankings as Google is paying greater attention to your site’s page speed in it’s bid to improve our online experience.

Start by using these free online tools:

This could be a series of blog posts in itself but here’s an example list of areas to investigate.

  • Are to optimising for the critical rendering path? i.e. are your pages displaying content at the earliest point possible? Amazon does a good job of this, it loads most of the page content instantly so the customer can start reading the content but in the background it’s loading all those non priority scripts and content such as adverts.

  • On this topic I’ve found that most social sharing plugins are seriously damaging the customer experience by blocking the content from displaying until it has downloaded the social sharing scripts. The way to fix this is to progressively load them after your core content (what the customer actually wants!) is loaded.

  • Are any of your scripts render blocking? Do they need to be?

  • Can you migrate some of your scripts to the bottom of the source or even delay their loading until after the content is displayed?

  • Is you CSS and JS minified and compressed. We’ve seen massive performance benefits from doing this.

  • Weight of images - How big are they? Are they optimised and compressed?

  • Are you serving different images for mobile and Desktop etc?

  • Unused scripts and elements - How much of the scripts and CSS you’re loading are you actually using? Frameworks are great but quite often they’re loaded with many features that you don’t need. Try to strip them back.

Markup and Data quality & integrity

This is another area that could be a series of posts. I’m only scratching the surface in this post. Writing semantic HTML brings a wide range of benefits including…

  • Ease of use for the customer
  • Accessibility
  • Search Engine Optimisation
  • Easier to reuse and repurpose content and code

Here’s some ideas on what to measure…

  • Are there any errors on the pages? Check your console and also run pages through the W3C markup validator

  • Heading structure - Do they convey the structure of the document rather than the visual styles i.e. if there is an H3 element on the page it should be preceded by an H2 element somewhere on the same page or are you using the H3 tag because it makes the font big and bold?

  • Is there only one H1 on the page, immediately before the main content?

  • Does your H1 reflect the title and content of the page?

  • Are your Meta tags filled out?

  • Does your site have any duplicate content, titles etc?

  • Do your images have completed Alt tags and are they described appropriately? Remember that images that only serve an aesthetic purpose should have a empty alt tag.

Link quality

Investigate your Internal & External link quality. There’s too much to cover here and it can become extremely complex but you could start with these steps…

#Internal link quality

  • Check that you are actually linking to relevant pages in your site, especially deeper pages - what I mean by this is, are there relevant links from one page to another. This is important for customers so that they can navigate your site but also for SEO. The keyword here is relevant, only link to pages that are useful and make sense to link to.

  • Check that there is a natural follow-on link / CTA from each page to continue the customer journey. Again, the priority is for this to be relevant to the customer.

  • Check the keywords within links - Don’t settle for bland CTAs such as ‘Find out more’ or worse ‘Click here’, you need to inform your customer’s what to expect, same goes for customers using screen-readers and Google of course.

  • On the same note, use natural language, don’t just stuff every link with a keyword.

  • Be careful not to go crazy with links or else you could be seen as spammy, if you’re linking for genuine customer benefit, you should be okay. Google only values the first 100 links anyway (roughly). My basic rule is, ‘Is this benefiting the customer? If it is, keep it, if it’s not, get rid of it’.

#External link quality

External links are an important factor in search ranking but they can also be damaging. Hopefully you’ll already be looking at this and other areas of SEO on a daily basis so I’m not going to go into any detail and ask only that you audit…

  • What external sites are linking to your site? Are they of good quality? If not, contact the site owner and get them to remove it. This can be a very positive action for your site and actually raise your ranking in the SERPs.

Accessibility

For me, this is an essential task that is too often overlooked or put off until it’s too late. Accessibility should be at the heart of your design, development and roadmap for the future and by doing so you will reap the benefits, making your site more usable, increasing conversion and improving your SEO. It’s about removing barriers for people with or without a disability and regardless of technology. Anyway rant over. I personally favour the RNIB’s ‘Surf Right’ standards as these are a rational mix of WCAG 2.0 Double-A and Triple-A requirements and this is what we use at The Co-op. Yet again, this another big topic that deserves much detail but here are some highlights.

  • See previous check about semantic markup

  • Can you navigate the site and all the page content using a keyboard only?

  • Try using the site with a screenreader, close your eyes and navigate by sound, how is the experience? Hard? Probably, what could you do to make it easier?

  • Can you complete and submit forms? If you make an error, is it identified and described?

  • Do your forms use semantic html, do all form fields have Labels using matching for=”” attribute?

  • Do your forms use Legends and Fieldsets to group associated form fields?

  • Are you using appropriate ALT tags for images that convey information?

  • Are you still creating images with lots of text in them? If so, come on it’s about time you got back to basics.

  • Can you access all content without JS enabled?

  • Can you change the size of the text on the page? Using fixed PX values for fonts can prohibit some browsers from increasing the size of the font. Using EMs is the best method to prevent this. As a side note I have an outstanding question as to the accessibility of REMs.

  • Is your body copy font size above 14 px? Using fonts above this size makes it generally easier for your customers to read the copy.

  • Check the contrast of your text - Use the Paciello Group’s Colour Contrast Analyser, available for free.

    • For body text you need a contrast level of 4.5:1.
    • For larger text (equivalent of 18pt or 14pt and bold) you can have a slightly lower contrast ratio of 3:1.

Handling of personal information

The personal data of your customers is sacred and should be protected and respected. Customers are becoming more sensitive to and savvy when asked to share their information. They are trusting you, if you fail, your brand reputation may never recover.

  • As a general rule, you should never ask for more then you need, are you using all the data you collect? Asking for less can also help conversion.

  • Are you using SSL on forms?

  • Are you deleting data you don’t use?

  • When was the last time your site was PEN tested? Calling in the experts now could save your business before all hell breaks loose.

Some random SEO house keeping

In no particular order…

  • How are your pages ranking? Which pages need attention?

  • Is your Robots.txt file available and up-to-date?

  • Any reports in Webmaster tools?

  • See previously mentioned Markup, Accessibility and links sections.

  • Use Screaming Frog SEO spider or another crawler to look for broken links, broken assets, duplicate titles, missing titles and metadata, redirects not working etc etc etc.

  • Do you have a HTML & XML site-map? Is it up to date? When was the last time you submitted it for crawling?

  • Are you taking advantage of microformatting and schema markup?

  • Check the quality of URLs, are you using of query strings etc. Are you setting canonical tags, remembering to do so for the closing ‘/‘ etc.

Cross browser / device compatibility

  • When was the last time you did a general sweep of your site on different devices? How does it hold out?

  • Do you perform well for your most popular browsers / devices?

Brand

Does your site adhere to your own brand standards and tone of voice? Reading your copy afresh might highlight some areas of revision and spark a fresh approach.

Functionality

How forgiving is key functionality? Can I make a mistake but still use it?

A common example of unforgiving functionality is forms that capture telephone numbers but won’t accept spaces or other characters. So even if I’ve put the right number in I can’t proceed until I’ve removed all spaces. Most forms I now fill in using my browser’s ‘Autocomplete’ because it’s quicker and I know that it’s correct so it’s a frustrating experience when I’m told I’ve made an error. In this instance, your telephone capture field should do the hard work and strip out spaces and other characters, not the customer.

Revisit your functions and see how forgiving they are.

Tap / hit area size

  • Can I easily access hit areas with my pork sausage fingers? Same goes for cursor hit areas, I shouldn’t have to have precision hand to eye co-ordination.

  • Google’s recommendation is for hit areas to be at least 48px tall / wide and 32 px away from the nearest other hit area.

The end, for now…

My fingers are tired so I’m going to wrap this up here. If you’ve got this far, well done and thanks for reading, I hope you’ll find this useful and I’ve inspired you to complete your site audit.