Who wouldn’t want to visit a fast, reliable, and top-quality website? Give your audience a reason to stay. This website analysis checklist will show you how.
You might have the best content out there. Your images and videos are simply stunning. However, if your web pages load at a snail pace, or it’s difficult to navigate around the site, you’ll lose visitors to your competitors.
Did you know that it takes an average of 15 seconds to capture your audience’s attention? Otherwise, your visitors will look elsewhere.
So, how do you make every second count? To capture their attention, you need to perform a website analysis.
When was the last time you’ve ever done an audit on your website? Maybe once, twice, or none at all? Aside from publishing content regularly, reviewing your site’s online performance is a must.
You might find issues that hinder the growth of your website. Using a website analysis checklist will help diagnose the areas for improvement and proactively do something about it.
We have outlined a comprehensive checklist to help you maintain a website that your audience will find valuable. Additionally, these steps will boost your website’s speed, performance, and rankings on search engines.
Why is Website Analysis Important?
Website analysis may seem daunting at first. With various metrics and website analysis tools to use, this may overwhelm a site owner who already has too much on their plate.
The good news is that auditing a website is not rocket science. All you need is a checklist to evaluate each aspect of the website. Depending on your goals, you can either focus on improving the speed, performance, security, and content quality or all of the above.
It’s important to have a website analysis checklist because it:
- collects the information you need to base your decision on the improvements.
- avoids the use of unnecessary metrics and tools, thus, saves you time.
- creates a clear direction for reviewing your website.
Once you’ve completed this checklist, you’ll learn to zero in on the outcome that will consistently grow your site’s traffic and lead conversion. There’s no reason for visitors to look at the competitors when your site has everything they need.
Complete Website Analysis Checklist
The next time you have to perform website analysis, use this checklist as your guide. This helps you to boost traffic, enhance your customer’s site experience, and convert them into paying customers.
Company Description, Products or Services and Benefits
- Do visitors understand what your website is about? Check if your website clearly defines what you do, the products or services you offer, and the value they get by visiting your website.
- If you’re unsure about this, create a survey (there’s tons of polls and survey tools out there). Ask existing customers what they think about your website. Do they know right away what your business is about the moment they view your Home Page?
SEO Audit
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is another critical element to look into. It’s a process of improving your website’s relevance, visibility, and rankings against competitors or content.
- Create a spreadsheet that screens the SEO format of all web pages. Does each page correctly optimizes your focus keywords on the Title, meta tag description, internal links, permalinks, and subheadings? Use SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO to help optimize your content before publishing.
- How does your site compare to others? Use a website analysis tool such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to evaluate competitive rankings. These tools give an overview of your domain authority, backlinks volume, and identify the areas that need to be worked on.
- To evaluate for keywords, page errors, and mobile-friendliness, we recommend you use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tool.
Mobile-Friendliness
Using Google Analytics or other tools for website analytics, you’ll find that traffic may primarily come from desktop and mobile. Nowadays, many people prefer to browse a website through their mobile devices.
This should prompt you to provide a seamless mobile experience; otherwise, they might jump to your competitor’s mobile-friendly site.
- If your website is not yet mobile-ready, ask your web developer to re-design your site and follow responsive web design practices. It means that your website will automatically adjust the size, layout, and proportion on a mobile device.
Page Speed
Nothing can be more frustrating than a website taking forever to load. A slow-loading website won’t only irk visitors, it can also affect your Google rankings. If you want to make your visitors happy and be on top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), make your website fast.
- To check the speed, scan your website link on PageSpeed Insight or GTMetrix. These website analyzers can test the speed both on desktop and mobile. Additionally, they give you tips on how to speed up your site.
Website Backups
A thorough website analysis won’t be complete without having a backup ready. Accidents may arise, and you don’t want to lose all your content just like that.
- Prepare a disaster recovery plan. It should outline what you’re going to do in case disasters like earthquakes, and cyber hacking will happen.
- For WordPress users, you can add plugins such as UpdraftPlus and VaultPress for your backup solutions. Other ways to back up a website: through cPanel and cloud solution (Amazon S3).
Security
Sadly, online hacking has become prevalent. You must have security measures in place to avoid unauthorized access to your logins and files.
- Never use ‘admin’ as your username. That’s the oldest loophole exploited by hackers. Check if any of your super users have admin as their usernames.
- Always use passwords that are difficult to hack. Don’t reuse the same password on all your account logins. You can use password managers such as LastPass and Dashlane to help you create and manage passwords.
- Monitor for malware. Your site may be infected with malware and viruses, so make sure to clean them up ASAP. Scan your websites on Sucuri and Astra Security Scan for any malware and malicious scripts.
A Comprehensive Checklist for Website Optimization
Once you step back and evaluate your website, you can easily pinpoint which areas need improvement. Essentially, you need to have enough information to make the right decision on which areas to improve on.
To do that, it’s important to conduct a thorough website analysis regularly. A checklist communicates to your visitors what you do as a company and how your website can provide the value they’re looking for. This website analysis checklist may take a few hours (or even weeks) to complete, but you’ll be thankful afterward for having done so.
If you need that extra arm with improving your site, we can help. At Full Scale, we’re all about innovating technology to make business processes easier and faster.
We are an offshore software development company with solid expertise in developing web and mobile applications. Also, our remote software team can analyze and increase your site’s performance and speed.
Contact us today for a FREE consultation.
