How to conduct an audit of your website, 5 helpful tips!
As a female entrepreneur, I am sure you have thought of how your website is doing in terms of foot traffic, exposure, increase sales, user experience. Most business owners convince themselves that the process of auditing their website is just too expensive. That may be true to a small business owner who doesn’t have that type of money to spend. Others may not even know where to start and choose to put it on the back burner. Well, I am here to offer you a few practical actions you make today to improve your site without shelling out too much money. Let’s jump right in.
The first question we need to understand is what is a Website Audit? A website audit is an in-depth analysis of everything that relates to your website. Going through a web audit will give you a deeper understanding of how your website is performing. For example, are you generating enough foot traffic, converting visitors on your site into subscribers and could your online sales do better? This review takes away the guesswork or wishing things turn around for the best.
Why should you as an entrepreneur be concerned with this?
As a business owner, you can’t afford to. The online world is very competitive and fast changing. Google and Bing are constantly improving and looking for ways to improve user experience and access to data on the web. In the past, It used to be that using Keywords throughout your website was enough, but not so anymore.
Search engines like Google and Bing add new elements to ranking. If you want to rank high, your website needs to meet these factors. We could spend days talking about rankings and what can be done, but I won’t do that to you! I am going to share with you 5 helpful tips you can take today to audit your site. Please note, no one really knows how Google or Bing determine who is going to rank high in their search results, that will be giving away their secret, right?. So whatever little changes we can do on our own will take us a step further ahead of our competitors.
Here are 5 helpful tips to audit your website:
1. Website speed
Do you know how fast your website pages loads? Are you twiddling your thumb while your page loads? Think about when your visitor lands on your website. If your site takes too long to load, that visitor will leave and move on to the next site causing you to lose a potential sale or subscriber.
2. Content
Content is King (sorry for using the cliche, but in this case, it is true!). Search engines are looking for quality content. Visitors are looking for information to help them. So when you are providing good content, people are going to want to stay on and read as much as they can and even click around to satisfy their curiosity.
3. Mobile Responsiveness
Is your website mobile responsive? Everyone has some form of mobile device, be it phones, tablets or other. You want to ensure your website is mobile responsive. That is to say, when a mobile device is used, your site displays properly, loads quickly and is easy to use. You want your visitor to have a great user experience even while on the go.
4. Custom code
Do you have custom code embedded in your website? Do you love to write custom code? That’s great! But can you say if your custom code is optimized (written efficiently) so that it is not causing your website to slow down or crawl? Custom features are great, but if not properly written, it can lower your ranking during searches. Take the time to understand how your code works and if needed, reach out to a developer if you notice your load speed is slower than it should be.
5. Images
Images are a breath of fresh air and help you set the right tone for your website. But are you uploading large size images? If so, that will impact your website significantly. There are tools to shrink your images to render them website friendly. One of my favorites is JPEGmini.
Here are some popular web tools you can use to perform a quick audit on your website:
If you find out there is room for improvement above and beyond these basic tips I provided, do seek the help you need. It’s well worth it!
What are some of the website audit tools you have used? Were they helpful? What other tips can you share?
