With every New Year comes the responsibility for many marketers to take stock of their websites to see what is working and what clearly needs sprucing up. It is true the word “audit” does not necessarily inspire excitement and is often met with a “groan.” However, it is an integral part of the process and can lead to some interesting outcomes for your website.
Fret not — we have compiled a list of seven tasks you must undertake to ensure your website looks, reads, feels fresh and compelling, is appropriately optimized, and provides an optimal user experience. Let us get started:
Analyze Site Design and UX
First things first: use SEO audit tools such as Google Search Console and Ahrefs Site Audit to examine the site’s overall design and user-friendliness.
This is to understand better how your target audience will interact with it, how long they spend time browsing through, and how you communicate with them on a web page via live chat or exit-intent popups.
Elements such as site navigation and page depth will show you whether it is easy for them to find information on your site. As per industry standards, your content should be accessible within three clicks from the homepage.
For instance, including breadcrumbs in the site design can help reduce the number of actions they have to take to get to a higher-level web page and improve the findability quotient of all site sections and pages.
Check Mobile Responsiveness and Usability
Poor infrastructure and financial restraints have compelled many emerging digital markets to skip the desktop internet phase and hop on the mobile internet bandwagon.
Besides that, leisure activities such as watching movies or videos online, emailing, and accessing social media significantly happen on mobile.
As of 2020, mobile accounts for 50.81% of global website traffic, which shows your website design should be mobile-responsive and suitable for consumption across different screen sizes.
For instance, if the CTA buttons are too small to click using a finger, that is a problem. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, a free tool, to identify if the site is responsive to smaller screen sizes. You must also have a clean layout that does not include unnecessary content and imagery, making it tedious for the mobile user to scroll down the site.
Another mistake is linking your mobile-responsive site to non-mobile-friendly sites. That can potentially hamper the overall user experience and level up your bounce rate. Do a thorough check of all hyperlinks to ensure this does not happen on your site.
Another important thing is ensuring your website is accessible for people with disabilities. You can use accessScan, accessiBe’s free ADA compliance checker. accessScan checks for conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and will highlight whatever gaps in accessibility exist within your website. You will also be given detailed instructions on ways to remedy these issues.
Secure Your Site
It does not matter how well-designed your site is, if it is not secure against hackers and viruses, popular browsers and search engines will flag it.
Therefore, for starters, get a Secure Socket Layer [SSL] certificate. It is an encryption method that allows sensitive data to remain private when transferred between web servers and user browsers. This is mandatory if your site has payment options, form sign-ups, or tracking codes.
Most website hosts provide free SSL certificates — get in touch with them if you do not have one. The URL of secure sites starts with “HTTPS://.” Sites without an SSL installed will flash error notifications in the search bar.
Plus, before you launch a new website or revamp it, be sure to migrate your SSL to the new server you are using. On top of this, a web application firewall is always a great idea to thwart off cyber attacks, through filtering and monitoring excess HTTP traffic.
Lastly, ensure you are protected against Spam. There are free WordPress plugins to help you with this too.
Proofread Your Website Content
Be sure that your content on every web page is both clear and informative and is free from spelling and grammar mistakes. It helps to have someone else review your content to spot any errors you may have missed out of ‘word blindness.’
Make sure your web content includes well-researched keywords that match the search intent are used judiciously throughout. Remove all “filler” content. You are only going to make your site look flimsy.
Review your title tags and meta descriptions. Ensure that both your title tags and your meta descriptions contain the target keyword for which you want to show up in search results.
They also need to be unique to each webpage. Your meta description should explain concisely what users can expect to find on that page.
Use bullet points, numbered lists, and colored hyperlinks as needed to be more readable and comfortably accessed by those with visual impairment. Use an ADA compliance solution for checking that and making appropriate changes.
Also, do not forget to optimize your content for mobile — use short paragraphs with white space wherever possible. Having great content on your site is essential, but you have to include them in the design so that they ensure an optimal user experience.
Test Browser Compatibility and Accessibility
Your website needs to offer the same optimal experience across devices. It should be equally easy-to-load and look good across different browsers.
Several tools such as Browserling can help you get an idea of what your site will look like for different users around the world — on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and so on.
Plus, check page speed. Users will likely exit your website if your pages take too long to load. Use tools such as Pingdom Tools or Google PageSpeed to test your page loading speed across devices and browsers, and incorporate any recommendations they have.
Another important thing is ensuring website accessibility for people with disabilities with aCe’s ADA Compliance Tester. For example, there should be sufficient contrast between the text used on images, buttons, and icons. The hyperlinks should also be differently formatted to make them easier to recognize.
Users with limited mobility use screen readers; they have to read the entire web page from top-to-bottom. Enable skip navigation so that they can skip long lists of links and use proper headings, such as <h1>, <h2>, and <h3>, for better navigation.
Optimize the Website for SEO
No matter how pretty your site is, you would not draw any visitors unless optimized for SEO. WordPress is exceptionally SEO-friendly on its own, but adding plugins such as Yoast will help you set up a sitemap, metatags, page descriptions, and more.
You should also remove any unwanted plugins and images for a more streamlined site loading experience. Secondly, remove any broken links in the website as they hurt your site SEO and bring down the user experience.
Therefore, be sure to check for any form time-to-time and remove them as you find them. Tools and plugins such as Xenu or the WordPress Broken Link Checker can help you here. But your job does not end with the web copy and links. You also need to optimize your images.
Your site images need to be optimized for SEO, just like your written content. Make sure they do not take too much time to load while remaining high in quality. Plugins like EWWW Image can help you compress your images without going overboard.
Lastly, do not forget to check your website forms. Few things are as frustrating as filling out a request/complaint form and never getting a reply. Ensure all the forms on your site are properly configured and that the requests are going to the correct email ID.
Do Not Forget to Add the Legal Details
In website design, pages on privacy, cookie collection, and GDPR are often called “hidden pages.” Their general placement is at the bottom of each — on the footer or after it. These pages are essential to include because they let the website visitors know how their data is being collected and for which purposes their information will be used.
This saves you from landing in any legal trouble or getting penalized. It is also essential to include any licenses for the images or videos you have picked up from an external repository.
Therefore, do not forget to add a Terms of Service page on the site, spruce up your privacy policy, add a cookie warning and comply with any GDPR restrictions if your site caters to the UK or EU. You must comply with any legal requirements about credit card processing, consent declarations, and so on. Maintain transparency.
Wrapping it Up
Conducting a UX Audit may sound like a lot of hard work, but trust us, it is doable. Take baby steps and pick up one activity at a time. That way, you will be armed with hard data and prepared to make relevant changes that can make a difference. Ensure your website UI/UX remains fully optimized for a considerable period.
