An audit of your WordPress website will provide you with valuable insights into both the present and future performance of your WordPress site, helping you ensure it is ready for whatever comes next.
A comprehensive website audit is the first step towards planning for future changes in WordPress, and ensuring your WordPress website is fast and performs well on all devices.
“The need for speed is increasingly evident with website performance. A poor user experience from a slow performing website often results in page abandonment” explains WPEngine. “In fact, one in four users will leave a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load. In addition, studies show that 88 percent of online consumers are less likely to return to your site after a bad experience.”
Performance Audits Improve Website Performance
An audit will identify any weaknesses and areas of improvement that need to be addressed today. In preparation for future-proofing, completing a professional audit of each aspect of your organization’s website is a critical first step.
Optimizing your website’s speed and framework is an essential part of ensuring its success. To do this, you should first use one of the tools offered by Google to assess your website’s performance score and identify any areas for improvement.
“Consumers are more demanding than ever before. And marketers who are able to deliver fast, frictionless experiences will reap the benefits.” explains Global Product Lead Daniel An back in 2017. “Today, it’s critical that marketers design fast web experiences across all industry sectors.”
Conducting a technical site audit and WordPress health check can help identify other potential issues with the site such as broken URL links or missing descriptions on images that may be preventing it from reaching peak performance.
“We trained a deep neural network—a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system” writes An. Using a massive “set of bounce rate and conversions data… the neural net, which had a 90% prediction accuracy, found that as page load time goes from one second to seven seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 113%. Similarly, as the number of elements—text, titles, images—on a page goes from 400 to 6,000, the probability of conversion drops 95%.”
Making fixes based on the results of these tests will ensure that all webpages comply with Google’s guidelines so that the search engine doesn’t penalize them.
What’s involved in an audit?
A website audit is a crucial step in preparing your online business for the future. Regularly auditing your WordPress site’s health and marketing strategies will help you stay ahead of the curve. A search performance audit, competitor analysis and speed testing, are all essential steps to take when assessing your website’s performance.
As you seek to optimize, improving user experience with a clean navigation menu and effective CTAs (well-placed and above-the-fold) should not be overlooked. Make sure that your organization’s website is optimized for mobile devices by running it through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool or a search performance audit can give accurate results about its responsiveness.
The key components that should be covered in an audit include:
- Content Audit – This looks at your current content structure and determines if there are opportunities to improve readability, engagement or SEO performance by restructuring existing content or creating new pages/posts. Looking at content can also help you identify issues with your overall content plan and uncover duplicate or outdated content that may need to be removed or edited.
- Technical Audit – A technical audit takes into account all of the back-end and front-end elements of your site, from the platform hosting it to the coding languages being used. This step is important for preparing your website for future changes as it helps identify any potential issues that could impede on performance when upgrading WordPress in the future or integrating new plugins/widgets into your design.
- Performance Audit – A performance audit looks at how quickly pages are loading and how users interact with them across different devices. In this audit, your team will identify areas where there are opportunities to improve. This might be optimizing content, design, or development structure.
- Design Audit – A design audit helps to improve the aesthetics and looks of your website. By uncovering potential design issues, you can easier keep your site visually appealing and easy to navigate.
By completing an audit of your WordPress site now, you’ll have a better idea of what needs attention so you can start planning for the future with confidence. You’ll also get peace of mind knowing that any upcoming upgrades or modifications will run smoothly without disruption to your business operations!
If you’re concerned about the speed or performance of your WordPress website, explore our solutions for speeding up WordPress and learn how our engineers solve complex problems for really big websites, and then how you can apply these solutions to your organization’s challenges.
If your team is technical, and has the capacity, learn more about ways you can address the issues and fix a slow WordPress website yourself.
