Your website is the face you present to the world. As such, it is vital to care for it regularly. A website audit helps you make sure that your site is functioning at maximum efficiency and with your key message in mind.
Website audits are not unlike other types of audits. Just as in your financials, safety protocols, or any other procedure in your business, they are a critical mechanism for:
- Discovering lost opportunities
- Creating more efficient processes
- Finding defects and hidden gems in your content
Let’s discuss how you can audit your website, what you should look for, and how to act upon your findings.
What Is a Website Audit?
A website audit allows you to see how your website is performing with the following in mind:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine page ranking (SERP)
- Lead conversion optimization and bounce rate analysis
- Accessibility standardization and compliance
- Look, feel, and design of the user experience (UX)
- Competitor and market analysis
- Content analysis
When performing a website audit specifically, it is important to ensure that not only does your website have actionable goals, but that it is also obtaining them in the most efficient and effective way possible. These goals should also be SMART goals.
SMART goals create excellent metrics and lead to more conversions, be they a message from a potential customer, a purchase from your site, or a donation to your nonprofit or organization. When you have a website, you must have a goal in mind at all times for your content and design. SMART goals keep your online presence aligned with your audience needs.
When you have a website, you must have a goal in mind at all times for your content and design.
Once you have your website goal(s) in mind, it’s time to start the audit.
The Five Cs of Auditing
The Five Cs of Auditing, as defined by the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors, consist of:
- Criteria
- Condition
- Consequence
- Cause
- Corrective action
Criteria are set forth when you create your SMART goals. These goals become the metrics for how you need your website to perform. If your site isn’t meeting these criteria, then it is not measuring up.
For example, if you have a newsletter sign-up on your website, you would want to create a SMART goal for subscriptions. This could look like:
I want to increase my newsletter subscriptions from the homepage by 50% over the next three months before I announce my new product to my audience.
This goal is SMART in that it is:
- Specific: describes new newsletter subscribers, not “increase awareness”
- Measurable: states a number, i.e., 50% more subscribers
- Actionable: defines an action to take
- Relevant: increases the audience before the new product release
- Timely: has a deadline, i.e., within three months
With this goal in mind, we can create our audit criteria. These criteria will measure how well the website is performing. Without a goal, your criteria will be meaningless.
Once you have your criteria ready, it’s time to review the conditions of your website and whether it is meeting your goals. Is the button hard to see? How many clicks did it get in the past 90 days? How does that differ from the previous year? What has improved? What hasn’t?
The audit conditions are the reality of the situation. While the new blue newsletter button is more attractive visually, it may be that you’ve found that the old green one did better. Always compare your data. You may be surprised.
Next, we have the consequences. These consequences are the result of the conditions not meeting the criteria. When coming to this step, it’s important to consider risk. If you change the button back to green, how risky of a change is that? What are the potential consequences (both positive and negative)?
Audit consequences let you know where to start after you have analyzed your conditions. If the newsletter button isn’t visible on the homepage at all, there is high risk to your goal of obtaining more subscribers. Consequences should also speak in terms of measurable impacts, such as sales goals or revenue changes.
Another risk to consider is that of opportunity cost. While opportunity cost is less easy to define in hard numbers, it is still a vital pulse on your website’s efficiency. If a simple button seems to be doing the job of getting newsletter subscribers, what would be the financial benefit in comparison to how much time it would take to change it to a popup banner?
While opportunity cost is less easy to define in hard numbers, it is still a vital pulse on your website’s efficiency.
Once you have your consequences, you can move on to the root cause of these defects (or, if you’re lucky, the hidden surprise of good consequences). Analyze where those clicks came from, how your audience is reaching you, what steps they are taking, etc. Get to the root cause in terms of the Five Whys.
The Five Whys in root cause analysis allow you to follow the “paper trail” (digital, in this case) back to the initial step taken. Why did you change the button color? Who were the stakeholders involved in that decision? How were the metrics performing before the change? How do they hold up to the metrics defined in the goal? Start by asking why and then continue to question each decision made until you find something to act upon.
Start by asking why and then continue to question each decision made until you find something to act upon.
Finally, you have your corrective actions. You have found the problem; how will you fix it? Again, think in terms of your SMART goals. What actions can you take to make that newsletter button really work for you? Now’s the time to list them out.
Audit corrective actions sum up the findings and define next steps. Look back at your risk assessment and consequences to begin prioritization. The higher risk a consequence has, the more priority it should have. Alternatively, you can look for the “easy” fixes, i.e., the ones with the lowest financial cost, opportunity cost, time to completion, and overall risk. A win is still a win at the end of the day.
Website SWOT Audit
While the Five Cs and the Five Whys are excellent for deep dives into your processes in general, it is also important to consider your website’s SWOT analysis:
- Strengths: internal factors positively affecting your site’s performance
- Weaknesses: internal factors negatively affecting your site
- Opportunities: external factors that can help your website
- Threats: external factors that can harm your website
It’s easy to incorporate a SWOT analysis into your audit using the Five Cs and Five Whys. Here is how we’d structure an audit combining SWOT and the Five Cs, starting with the strengths:
- What criteria (SMART goals) need to be met when considering the site’s strengths?
- What are the conditions of the website’s strengths, i.e., how strong is it really?
- What are the internal causes of the strengths?
- What are the consequences of these strengths? What is the risk involved in changing or enhancing these strengths?
- What corrective actions can we take to increase the strong points of the website?
And on through weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The Meat of the Matter
When performing a website audit, there are specific, standard ideals for the best website in the world. Luckily, these ideals are obtainable once put into practice as SMART goals relevant to your organization and its mission. Look through these topics and consider them when performing your audit and SWOT analysis.
Search Engine Optimization
How well does your website perform on search engines? What’s your ranking for your specific, relevant key terms? Does every piece of content on your site, from images and alt text to headings and bolding, follow SEO best practices?
Lead Conversion, Bounce Rate, and Time on Page
Does your site convert? Are people reading your content? How long does a person usually stay on a particular page or part of a page? Do they click links or calls to action (CTAs)? Do these turn into actionable leads? How strong are these leads?
Accessibility
How accessible is your website to people who have color blindness? People who use screen readers or translation software? People who need large text to read? These factors are vital for a well-performing website.
User Experience and Quality Assurance
How does your site look, feel, and navigate? Does it load fast enough? Are there broken links? What are the obstacles people run into when trying to convert from stranger to advocate?
Competitor Audit
How are your competitors performing in comparison to you? Are your competitors performing better? Are your customers finding them more often than you? Are they doing the same thing as you, only better/worse?
Content and Design Audit
Should you be A/B testing your content (yes)? What words or images or colors work better in different regions or markets? Who is reading your content? What content is working better than others or better than your competitors?
Finally, now that you have all the tools in place, you can begin your audit!
Now, For the Easy Part
Lost? Confused? Not to worry! Nine Muses Writing Group happily performs website audits for growing and established organizations to determine how to make their content really work for them. Contact us today for a free consultation!
