How to Audit Your Own Website - Website Auditing Guide #1

How to Audit Your Own Website

Finding out whether your website is 2020 ready is simple and easy. We will be covering a series of blogs to help you understand more about Auditing a website, from doing it yourself to understanding how to interpret the Audit output information.

To figure out why you should audit your website is fairly simple. Here are three simple reasons on why you should perform an Audit Test for your website:

1. Improving Brand Impression - In a ever-growing digital world, people are first introduced to your business or personal brand through your website. If your website is slow, has poor accessibility for people with disabilities it can and will likely leave a negative impression. The first 30 seconds are everything when making a first impression. Your website is a reflection of yourself and your business so make your first impression last.

2. Recognising Website Issues - You get to find out first hand which issues exist within your website. Although this audit won’t find out every single problem regarding your website, it will provide enough information to help you improve the existing site drastically.

3. Improving Website Ranking - Having your website audited and improved will help you improve your website ranking. There are 4 main categories your website will be tested for in the Audit Test. These results will determine how well your website will be ranked on the Google Search Engine amongst many other factors.

The tool we will be using is called Lighthouse, full information can be found on this tool can be found on https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for testing websites. This tool is useful for finding problems on your website so that the overall website quality can be improved.

This is available in chromium based browser (e.g. Google Chrome, Opera, Vivendi). It can also be installed on Mozilla Firefox using the addon link found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/lighthouse-report-generator/

For the purpose of the tutorial we will be using Lighthouse through the Google Chrome web browser.

How To:

1. Go to your website domain (e.g. zedsoft.co.uk)

2. Once on the website, on Google Chrome press CTRL + SHIFT + I

3. You will see a new tab appear on the right side of the screen. Click on the double right arrow tab next to the sources tab, and a drop down menu should appear. Click on ‘Audits’.

4. Select and check the boxes for these following categories: ‘Performance’, ‘Best Practises’, ‘Accessibility’ and ‘SEO’. Keep ‘Progressive Web App’ unchecked as it's not necessary for this audit test.

5. Make sure ‘Publisher Ads’ in the Community Plugins(beta) section is unchecked.

6. Select the Device you wish to audit your website on, in this case select the ‘Desktop’ radio button.

7. Click the Generate Report Buttone the audit has completed you will receive the scores along with explanations on how and where you can improve your website.

You can also export your report as a PDF, once the report is generated simply click on the 3 dotted tab labeled ‘Tools Menu’ and select ‘Print Summary’

As shown above, we see 4 key results once the website is Audited. On part two in this series of blogs, we will be discussing how you can read and understand your own Audit Test scores to help you improve the quality of your website.

Please feel free to reach out to [email protected], we can help you explain your website audit scores, perform audit tests and help you find out exactly how your website can be improved.

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