Why do I need a website audit?

Most people who ask me for a website audit get in touch for the same reason: their website isn’t performing the way it should.

Why people ask for one

Quite often they’re not happy with whoever looks after their site now. A story I hear a lot goes something like this. Someone built the website, and then the owner never heard from them again. SEO was meant to be part of the job, but none was done. Now the site doesn’t appear in Google’s results, it isn’t very fast, and the owner isn’t happy.

An audit gives you a clear picture of where your website stands, and what to do about it, whoever ends up making the changes.

What I check

• Speed. How fast it loads, especially on phones. This is the key one.
• SEO. How well it’s set up for search engines to find.
• Accessibility. How well it works for people who use screen readers and other assistive technology.
• Structure. How the page addresses (the URLs) and the links between pages are set up.
• Anything that isn’t working the way it should.

Why speed matters so much

Speed is the one that’s so easy to get wrong. People build a website and don’t manage the images properly, and large images can be incredibly slow to load, on phones in particular. Lots of other things affect speed too. It matters, because Google takes speed into account when it decides where to rank your site.

Here’s a typical example. One client’s website had two big problems. Every banner on the site used a massive image, and there was nothing in place to stop more being uploaded. And because the site used a huge number of plugins, every page was loading hundreds and hundreds of files in the background: images, styles, scripts and all sorts of others. Much of that could have been done in a far more efficient way.

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is how well a website works for visitors who can’t see or use it the way most people do.

Take someone who is blind or partially sighted. They use a screen reader, which reads the page aloud. It relies entirely on the text, plus information hidden in the page that says what each part is: a description of every image, which lines are headings, where the menu is and where each link goes. When that’s missing, a screen reader user can’t tell what’s on the page.

Other visitors can’t use a mouse and get around the page with only the keyboard, or need strong contrast between the text and the background to read it at all.

Accessibility is an often overlooked part of building a website, but for the people who rely on it, it’s absolutely critical. That’s why I check it in every audit.

What you get back

My website audit costs £750, fixed. Within a week you get a report as a PDF, broken down into sections: performance, SEO, accessibility, best practices, and anything else I’ve found that isn’t working. Each section sets out what’s good, what could be improved, and what can be done about it.

It’s your report. You don’t have to ask me to fix anything, and you can use it however you like.

If you would like me to make the changes, I’ll give you a price first. That depends on where your website is hosted, how it’s been built and how complicated the changes are, but you’ll have a quote before I do any work on it at all.

When you don’t need one

If you’re happy with your website, it loads quickly, you’re getting traffic and you think your SEO is in good shape, you possibly don’t need an audit.

That said, it’s pretty unusual for a site not to benefit from one, because an audit always picks up bits and pieces. When I look after a website, I run audits on it regularly to check that the changes we make along the way aren’t affecting its speed, its SEO or anything else.

Want me to look at yours?

Send me your web address and I’ll tell you whether an audit would help. If your site’s already in good shape, I’ll say so.