How to Conduct a Website Audit Before Starting a Redesign?

If you are concerned about your website losing business, then you must conduct a website audit. Never underestimate the importance of your website performance. To remain competitive and retain your edge, audit for an accurate website performance analysis. 

Remember, every website has a shelf life. With the digital arena evolving constantly, your website also needs to grow. Never let technological changes, buyer behavior or competition outpace your website. Your website is your digital storefront. Ensure it articulates your brand proposition clearly and demonstrates your technical expertise and experience.

In this blog, we will talk about the web design audit process and help you prepare a website audit checklist.

The Key Components Of A Web Design Audit

When you approach a top website design and development company in India for a website redesign, it is because you think your website lacks something. To better understand “What it lacks,” all website redesign services prefer auditing the website to pinpoint its inadequacies and understand what is pulling it back. 

A website audit provides a detailed assessment of a website’s performance, including its:

• Health
• User experience
• Brand messaging
• Design
• Technical performance
• SEO

The goal is to gain clarity on:

• How well you can attract and engage with your target audience through your website
• How to improve website performance to gain more leads and conversions

Based on the answers gained, your web design company will take a call on whether to correct the inconsistencies by making a few adjustments or opt for a complete redesign. There is a huge difference in the costs involved. The insights gained from the website audit will justify your spending by logically explaining its need.

Here are six components that you must explore to understand what redesigns are required.

Health And Technical Performance

Initiate your website audit with a series of website health checks. They should encompass everything from plugin health to your website’s overall speed. Slow-loading websites or those with broken links invariably result in:

• Negative performance
• Frustrating user experiences
• Lowering of your search engine ranks

While there are many effective tools to evaluate your website’s health, leverage professional ux and ui design services for technical health analysis. Some critical factors you must explore during the health checkup and technical analysis include:

• Mobile-friendliness and responsiveness
• Website loading speed for desktops and mobiles
• Presence of 404 errors or broken links
• Security vulnerabilities, if any
• Accessibility and WCAG compliance
• Proper functioning of interactive elements like forms
• If the associated codes follow clean coding practices, are optimized and well-structured

User Acquisition and SEO

Since you are losing visitors to your website, your audit process must comprise of techniques that analyze your user behavior. 

How do users come to your website? 

What attracts them to your website?

You can leverage data sourced from Google Analytics and the Google Search Console for your answers. Your partnering front-end developers must analyze data over a period of six to twelve months. This will help account for seasonalities. 

Data from Google Analytics will also help you understand how you acquire your visitors. Whether they directly land on your website or are routed through organic search or social media platforms. From this, you will infer two essential pieces of information:

• Who are your visitors?
• What do they expect from your website?

Google Analytics, or GA4, as it is called now, will also give you data about your top landing pages. You must study the messaging, content, imagery, design, layout, and theme of these pages since they will make the first impression on your visitors. 

Next, leverage the Google Search Console, a key tool for understanding the queries that take people to your website. This will give you insights about the top keywords users search for. 

Deep dive into the data you receive from GA4 and Google Search Console. Document them for an extended period and monitor them for information on:

• Your top traffic sources
• Keywords driving traffic to your website
• Impact of title tags and meta descriptions
• Whether metas are optimized for your focus keywords
• Clarity of the sitemap and robot.txt file
• Success of back-link building techniques implemented

User Behavior

By now, you have gained a lot of information about your landing pages, keyword relevancy, and website SEO. Next, you must understand what actions your user experience design company needs to take to improve your website performance and user experience.

Visitors to your website will either stay back to explore further or bounce off immediately. You must again leverage Google Search Console to gain an accurate measure of this behavior. It will give you the engagement rate for each webpage. The ideal average engagement rate is usually 55%. You must flag any pages that fall below this.

GA4 offers a path exploration feature. Using this, you can visualize what your visitors explore on your website, which pages they navigate to, and how your users engage with your web pages. You can use third-party tools to build heatmaps and collect specific insights into what your users like on your web pages and what they choose to ignore. The data collected will give clarity on:

• Your key webpage engagement rate
• Time spent by users on your website per session
• Most popular web pages
• Whether users navigate to pages you want them to
• What navigation bar links they are clicking on

User Experience And Engagement

Your website is a dynamic storefront encouraging users to engage more with your business through intuitive and interactive elements. So, in this phase of your website audit, we will shift focus to the type of content that your users like to engage with. Think of this as a measure of your website’s “stickiness.” 

While many things impact user engagement and UX, you must first determine how your users react to the content on your web pages. 

Is the content capable of generating interest and curiosity? 

Do they offer links to encourage users to dive deeper and discover new content?

If your answers to the above questions are negative, your website elements are dead ends. They actively encourage users to leave your website and explore competitors’ websites. This increases your bounce rates.

Ideally, an effective website design proactively presents relevant content after anticipating user needs. This helps create a seamless user journey and an engaging user experience. So, when conducting your website audit for user experience, you must use a combination of tools and analytics to obtain the right picture. Part of this exercise will be intuitive. That is why, even though website audit tools are available, you must engage with an experienced user experience design company. They will help you answer the following queries.

• Are your CTAs clear and compelling?
• Does your website have internal links and guide users to relevant resources and content?
• Is your website content offering value by being engaging and informative?
• Have you integrated visuals and multimedia to offer a superior UX?
• How effective is your lead capture strategy?
• Can your website help the sales funnel to nurture your leads?

Brand Design And Messaging

Do you know your website must impress your users within .05 seconds? See how important first impressions are. 

If you have a visually compelling website, it will significantly impact how users perceive your company or business. So, in this audit section, we will solely focus on your website aesthetics and messaging. You will understand how well your website aesthetics reflect current web design trends and how effectively it establishes your brand identity. We will do this by examining your website’s imagery quality, visual hierarchy, and use of videos. Some questions to which you will seek answers here include:

• Are you relying on generic stock photography?
• Do your integrated, unique, high-quality visuals capture user attention?
• Is your video placement strategic enough to tell your story by engaging with your users?
• Are you still using legacy web design strategies?
• Does your website concur with the best practices of minimalistic web design?

Once you get the answers, you must use them to improve your website’s aesthetics by paying special attention to:

• The placement of your logo
• The color palette used and the brand style you follow
• Images and videos featured on your homepage
• Navigation design and iconography
• Consistency of custom backgrounds used
• Type of language used within textual content

But remember, building a strong brand design does not solely rely on aesthetics. It communicates professionalism. It builds credibility through a distinct brand personality. So ensure that your website audit pinpoints any visual elements that do not resonate with your branding or hinder user engagement.

Use the following questions to understand the effectiveness of your brand design.

• Is your website design in sync with your brand design guidelines?
• Does your website content reflect your brand’s personality?
• Is it visually appealing and offers clear, concise, and persuasive language?
• Does your website navigation offer a seamless user journey?
• Are your images and videos in sync with your content?
• Does your typography and visual hierarchy enhance readability?
• Do you leverage storytelling to connect with your users and build trust?
• Does it maintain design consistency across all web pages?
• Is your website in sync with the latest web design trends?
• Have you communicated your firm’s value proposition?

Competitive Analysis

This is the final stage of your website audit. Here, you gather, compare, and contrast all your discoveries against your key competitors. You must understand and critically evaluate your competitive landscape. Understanding where they score and miss will help you carve a better website strategy. So, we will conclude the website audit process by turning our attention toward your competitors.

In this phase, you must analyze their online presence and search for opportunities that can act as your differentiator. Seek insights into how they position their services, keyword usage, content marketing techniques, and any other factors setting them apart. The insights you gather from competitor analysis will help you understand what your customers expect. 

Conclusion

Once your partnering website developers complete your website audit, sit with them and analyze the insights. If your website differs radically from what is expected, you must opt for a redesign. Integrate the suggestions and insights gathered from the website audit to ensure long-term growth and success.