Spring Clean your Website with a Website Audit
It’s the season for resetting, and that doesn’t just mean getting the cobwebs from the corner of your room.
Open the windows and get the duster (no, not that duster — unless you want to look badass WHILE spring cleaning) because it’s Spring Cleaning time.
Spring Cleaning, while usually reflective of your physical space, can and SHOULD extend to your digital space as well. As Quarter 1 closes and the selling season picks up, now is the perfect time to take a look at your website’s content management system (CMS) and perform a little digital clean-up, also known as a website audit.
What is a Website Audit?
According to Hubspot,
“A website audit is an examination of page performance prior to large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign. Auditing your website can determine whether or not it's optimized to achieve your traffic goals, and if not, how you can improve it to increase performance.”
In layman’s, a website audit is taking a step back and looking at your website through an objective lens, ensuring that the site is helping to accomplish your company-established goals.
When Should I Conduct a Website Audit?
If you’re looking for a cadence, then you should conduct a website audit each time you establish your company’s KPIs or business objectives for the coming time frame. Some set their goals quarterly, some set them annually — it’s all depending on your business and workflow.
However, Maker Bee recommends you conduct a website audit at least once a year. And what better time than Spring Cleaning season to serve as your annual reminder?
How to Perform a Website Audit
A website audit doesn’t need to be a huge ordeal or undertaking. In fact, add a ClickUp task for yourself in early April to conduct the audit each year so you have plenty of time to not only investigate but fix anything that needs attention.
Oh wait, you’re not using ClickUp yet? Let’s fix that right away.
Here is a step by step checklist of tasks to perform a successful website audit:
Run an SEO Audit
As an SEO specialist, of course this is going to top our list. Performing an SEO audit doesn’t only tell you how you can improve your website to meet your goals, but it will also tell you if there are redirect errors, missing metadata, or duplicated content across your site. Fixing these errors will improve your SEO and improve your customer experience. That’s what we call a double whammy.
To run an SEO audit, you could purchase a tool like SEMRush or Moz and use that to track and monitor your website’s performance. However, those tools can be expensive if you’re only managing one brand.
Google has several built-in tools to monitor your website’s performance, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google Search Console is great for detecting coverage errors (and it’s also pretty fun to do a query search). Google Analytics is a more technical site that provides insights into user behavior and site performance.
Fix any broken or misdirected links
After you run your SEO audit, you’ll likely develop a list of 404 errors, or redirect errors. This is when a link on the internet points to one of your site’s pages that has been moved or deleted.
Google sees this as a fatal flaw of an unreliable site, so it’s in your best interest to update these pages as soon as possible. The aforementioned SEO tools (Moz, SEMRush) will tell you where the 404 errors are coming from. However, many times it can be difficult to find the link embedded somewhere on your layered page.
If you cannot find the origin of the 404 links, you can always set up a 301 redirect. This tells Google, Bing, and external sites that the former site URL doens’t exist anymore and it should go to the new page, therefore fixing the error.
Each CMS has a different way of doing this (Squarespace, Webflow, Wordpress, Wix, etc.) but completing this task to ensure you have no 404 errors is well worth the effort.
Update old, well-performing blog posts
When you’re going through your Google Analytics, navigate to “Behavior”>”Site Content”>”All Content” and open up your date range to the last time you performed a site audit. See the screenshot below for an example report.
From here, take a look at your highest-performing pages and/or blog posts. Some of them will be obvious (home, contact, etc). But, there are usually a few outliers from high-quality thought leadership blog posts. Are those posts converting for you? Do you have opportunities for the user to contact you for more information or to sign up for services/purchase products? Do you have the tracking set up to monitor and monetize those posts?
Google also very much appreciates updated content, to the point where you can dramatically increase your page rankings if you go and add more information (and more keywords along with it).
While it may seem like pageviews is the most important metric here — and it’s pretty important — pay attention to the other metrics as well. Here are a few favorites:
Unique Pageviews: If this number is near 1:1 with your page views, you can tell that the users are visiting, getting the information they need, and then moving on. If these numbers aren’t correlating to sales or inquiries, it’s time to try and capture those users with more CTAs, Read More options for further information/learning, or email capture lead hooks (downloadable content, newsletter subscription, etc).
Average Time on Page: Google looks at this metric in a big way as a method for understanding the value of your information. Are people jumping on and bouncing off immediately? Are they sticking around and reading to the bottom? If the time on the page is pretty fast, you might insert more headings to capture the users’ attention.
Nowadays, we have zero attention span — make sure the information is easy to find.
Bounce Rate: This means that people are coming to this page but then exiting the page without going to any other pages on the site. This is a very important metric for content, as the idea of content marketing is to develop trust with your customers and provide enough value for them to purchase products or services from you.
If users are bouncing from your page, look for more linking opportunities, a stronger “Read More” section or an overall content refresh on the page.
Lastly, look for opportunities to create content strings. A content string is developing a list of stories that can link from one post to another, providing more granular information with each click. Keep an eye on this post over the next few months and you’ll see me create a dozen extra content pieces based on topics I introduce in this singular, pillar post. Reread your strong content and look to see if there are any questions you can answer, like “What is a Content String?”
Run a UX audit
This is not only a great task to perform during your spring cleaning audit, but a great task to run any time a page isn’t performing up to your standard, expectations, or KPIs.
A UX, or User Experience, audit is exactly what it sounds like: examining your website or individual pages to understand why users are not interacting with your website or page in the way it was intended.
Did you write a blog post intending for users to go to your services page? What about the services page to your contact and/or conversion page? Do your blog posts have a high bounce rate? Use a UX audit to identify where, how, and why users are bouncing from your site.
Then comes my favorite activity in all of the marketing: testing and iterating. Start by making a log of your changes and proposed tests with the ideal outcomes. Set a timeframe for when you’d expect to see the results and then set yourself a timer (or a ClickUp task *wink*) to make sure you are holding yourself and your changes accountable.
Clean media library
Over the course of months (...or let’s be real: years), you’ve probably accumulated a stockpile of media in your asset collection on the CMS. These could be old employee headshots, older versions of logos, some old creative you used for a blog post, or 5 images of varying sizes you were editing to fit into a specific page section.
So for our first step: it’s time to remove those and introduce a little organization. By removing those old creative assets, you’re ensuring that anyone in the future will not use the wrong image/logo/creative asset.
After you’ve done that, run a report through Google Lighthouse to see if the images you’re using are too large. Why do large images matter for your website? Google will dock your site SEO points if you have “heavy” images, or images over 1MB, you should run them through an image compressor like TinyPNG to get them closer to the ideal size (70kb - 100kb). All of this is within reason — if you’re realizing that your more complex images are losing a lot of quality, then make a judgment call, Just try and get them to be as small as possible.
More information to come about image resizing soon!
Update users/ownership
Do you remember that one person you hired that one time to do that one thing? What about that employee who didn’t work out? Well, they all still technically have access to your website because you forgot to remove them back in the day.
Cleaning your user count not only ensures there are no unauthorized changes across your website but depending on your website management system you could also save some money on user count.
This applies to your whole tech stack, by the way. Use this task as a reminder to go through all of your programs and applications and clean your users. The number of times I’ve worked with a client who was paying for users that hadn’t accessed the system in months is staggering.
Update plugins/integrations
Maybe one of the more overlooked the routine tasks for updating your website. Updating plugins sometimes happens automatically. However, other CMS systems (looking at you Wordpress) require you to push your updates automatically.
During your Spring Cleaning website audit, take a look at any and all of your plugins and really think about their functionality and operational value in your business. Are you using the plugin consistently? With which business goal is the plugin, app, or integration helping? Is there a measurable cost-benefit?
Take this time to update any existing plugins or integrations. Any that don’t provide value or were from an update of yesteryear, get rid of them.
You’re Ready for your own Spring Cleaning Website Audit
And if you’re not, that’s where we come in. We take care of this each and every month for our clients, ensuring that the following Spring we won’t need to run through a huge backlog of clean-up work.
When we start with website maintenance clients, we start by performing an audit similar to the one laid out in this post. Then, we build on top of the solid foundation we’ve built to not only maintain but improve your website’s performance for both Google and your potential customers.
Let’s make a website that works for you.