Today, websites rule the business world like never before. They help your customers find you, convince them to buy your products, and promote your brand.
And websites are able to do these jobs better, faster, and more efficiently than ever through website audit services. A website audit performed by experts helps you uncover your site’s potential capabilities. It also helps you find and fix the drawbacks that are keeping it back.
An audit is one of our web agency’s services because we know from experience that websites are capable of more! Let’s take a closer look at how we do a website audit.
Areas of the website audit
Every website is unique so it has specific needs and problems to be fixed. So we start with a quick review of your site in a number of areas. This lets us know which special in-depth audits to recommend to you. Among them are the following.
Security audit
You want to be sure your website is 100% protected from hackers. They are getting smarter every day, using malware, spyware, phishing, ransomware, and much more. By ordering security audit services, you will get a comprehensive security check of your site, as well as your hosting server.f
Our experts can advise and implement the best security measures related to protective software, password policy, regular backups, encryption, two-factor authentication, access rights reviewal, and so on.
Performance audit
Good website speed gives you more potential customers because users do not leave your website. Speed also improves your SEO as it is a ranking factor used by Google. Finally, users are more likely to make conversions on a fast website, which boosts your profits. Seconds and milliseconds literally cost your business money!
There are plenty of reasons why your site could work faster than it does. They are related to image optimization, JS/CSS aggregation, use of caching, and much more. In the performance audit services, our specialists analyze them all and can provide full optimization.
Code review
Clean code is a guarantee of your website’s efficient work. It improves performance and makes your website more maintainable, or open to future changes — easy to update, extend, and modify.
Unfortunately, not all development teams write good code that is up to coding standards. That’s why code review is important. Our developers will do the code audit after some other performers to discover what can be improved in it.
Audit of website extensions
Website extensions can add extra functionality to your site in many ways. These can be CMS extensions like Drupal modules, or WordPress plugins.
However, they also need to be reviewed, especially with time. Some of them get outdated or contain security issues, some may be pulling your website performance down or causing other issues. An audit of website extensions will discover which of them needs a clean-up or replacement.
Website theme audit
Your theme creates the visual appeal of your site. It attracts your potential customers and builds your brand image. But it’s much more than just about the looks.
The theme helps your users interact with your website and perform all the needed steps. All its buttons, forms sidebars, toolbars, and other elements should serve this purpose. It should be up-to-date and compatible with your key plugins. The website theme audit services are meant to check all this and more.
Server configuration review
How is your server doing? Its review is important for your website’s performance and security. So let our DevOps experts analyze it.
They will check the work of all services and see if there are any trojans (hidden or unused services). Only the necessary services should be left in place.
Firewall configuration and the proper access rights are also vital for security. The services that block automatic password generation should be enabled. The software should be up-to-date with the security releases and configured according to its developer’s recommendations.
SEO audit
Your site’s position in search engines can always be enhanced — it just needs to follow the best SEO practices. Our SEO audit services mean an in-depth review of this.
We cover the internal linking, keyword optimization according to your specific business needs, user-friendly and keyword-rich URLs, unique and relevant title tags, ALT text for images, the correct robots.txt file, XML sitemap, and much more.
UX/UI audit
How are customers doing on your site? Is it convenient to use and is it easy to reach their goals? Does it follow the usability guidelines? UX and UI audit services will give answers to these questions.
UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) design are responsible for the user experience on the website. UI design deals with the role of graphical elements in it, while UX design is more about the entire experience.
Let our UX and UI designers give a comprehensive evaluation of this, as well as a number of actionable recommendations to improve digital experiences and increase conversions on your site.
Website architecture audit
Website architecture is the way your site is structured and how it helps users find information and make conversions. Essentially, it is the logical layout of your website in accordance with your business needs.
This includes the structure of pages, navigation, internal linking, and much more. In site architecture audit services, our experts can review your website’s architecture and recommend its improvement.
Website audit tools
To provide higher precision, streamline the audit processes, and eliminate the chance for human error, we often use audit automation tools. They replace manual work where it is justified. Still, in many cases, nothing can replace the experience and attention of human experts.
Depending on the audit area and your website’s peculiarities, we pick the optimal tools. If your website is built with a CMS, website audit tools include useful extensions (Drupal modules, WordPress plugins, and so on).
Drupal modules we use for website audit:
WordPress plugins we use for website audit:
- WP Security Audit Log
- iThemes Security plugin
- Wordfence Security
- Yoast SEO
- All in One SEO Pack
- Broken Link Checker
- and many more
Non-CMS-specific audit tools our team uses:
- SonarQube
- PHP_CodeSniffer
- SUCURI
- OWASP Zed Attack Proxy
- SiteAnalyzer
- and many more
What experts perform website audit
As website audit covers many aspects, we have an extensive team of experts. Each of them is a master of their craft. However, in many cases, perfect results are achieved by teamwork, so they cooperate with each other.
- Web developers review the code quality, study the CMS extensions, analyze the website’s configuration, study the website’s architecture, and much more.
- Web designers review the site’s presentation layer for good UX and UI.
- DevOps experts study the server configuration and its impact on performance and security issues.
- SEO managers do the SEO audit and find what can help your website to be found more easily by search engines
The steps of website audit services
- Ideally, the audit is performed on a copy of your website that we deploy to our server. For this purpose, we will need your database dump and code. Working on a copy of a website is a recommended option. We will work out an agreement with you regarding any sensitive information on the site. However, if the security topic is too sensitive for you (for example, if your database has personal or payment information) we can be flexible and advise you on other options. These may include a stripped database dump, audit in your presence, and so on.
- Our experts do a quick review of your website in multiple spheres, define which types of specific audits are most recommended to you, and provide you with an estimate.
- According to the audit types and scope of work that we agree with you, our experts perform in-depth reviews with the use of optimal tools.
The result of website audit
As a result of your website audit, you get a detailed report containing our experts’ recommendations. It also features the estimates of the time needed to implement each of them. If everything’s agreed, our specialists bring these recommendations to life.
Your site will get better in multiple aspects, and more ready to be an effective business tool for you.
Schedule your website audit today!
We have looked closer at website audit services so you understand how they work. Give your website a new start and refill its engines — order website audit with our web development team.
