Why does your website need an audit?

You know how it happens — you launched an excellent website with animation, special effects, and other modern features, but there are still no sales. To understand why it happens you need to conduct a web audit - that is, analyze the site’s effectiveness, usability, and logic.

There are several reasons that suggest an audit is necessary. Here are some of them:

• You see a decline in your website sales. While this might be a seasonal or industry-related issue, an audit can let you narrow down the case.
• High bounce rates on your web pages. Usually, a bounce rate higher than 10-20% is considered a high one.
• Inconsistent data. The information provided in your analytics differs from the one you get from your sales reps or other sources. Inconsistency leads to a lack of trust in the data collected or forecasting capabilities.
• High loading times. On average, an extra loading second brings up to 10-15% of higher bounce rate. Losing your audience is not optimal.
• Design inconsistencies. You could observe bugs or small design inconsistencies on your website yourself.
• Relevance. In order to comprehend whether your site is informative for your audience, in particular, compared to your competitors, an audit might be necessary. A simple question of whether you fully understand the service offered on your website can be a good insight into your current optimization.
• Google Ranking dynamics. If you observe a negative dynamic on your target keyword (i.e. your website rank is lower.)?

A website audit's main goal is to provide webmasters with a thorough and in-depth study of the “health”, performance, and speed of their websites.?By evaluating these areas, you'll get a complete picture of how effective your site is right now, see where you might be able to further optimize and improve it and spot any problems that might be affecting its stability.

The audit is carried out on several key blocks — it can be a technical audit, SEO, usability, interface (UI/UX), competitive, branding communication, etc. You can analyze everything: advertising banners, the number of clicks before performing actions, the format of images on the site, and their weight in order to optimize the page loading speed. It is not always necessary to audit all indicators in order to close the client's tasks — and some blocks cannot be carried out at all. Let's analyze each one.

Performance evaluation:?The most important question for the website is whether it solves the tasks that are set? Here we use the Yandex Metric and Google Analytics, where the watch conversion rates and behavioral factors: the percentage of failures, viewing depth, and total time spent on the website. If these indicators are low, the site has a bad structure and it needs to be changed urgently. If there are advertising banners that traffic comes from, we also look at them: how much the advertising message corresponds to the content and whether there is an imbalance of "expectation — reality" when switching from it to the site.

Usability and interface assessment (UI/UX): Here you need to evaluate what you want to receive from the user — a request, a purchase, a subscription? Go through the user's path and check every detail from the point of view of business logic: from the number of actions to copywriting, and calls to action.?If, say, from the moment you get to the site to the purchase, you need to make 8 transitions, fill out 3 forms and only then you can get to the payment form, this is not good. The easier it is for the user to register/buy/subscribe, the better. It is desirable that the whole path should fit into 1-3 steps.

Technical audit:?One of the indicators of why people leave the website is the speed of its loading and operation. If the download takes more than 2-3 seconds, there is a risk that the user will not wait. You can check the speed in Pagespeed Insight — the tool will also tell you how to optimize the site. Also, analyze the title and description meta tags — for example, this service is suitable for this.

There are two more important points: adaptability and cross-browser compatibility. In the era of the mobile-first, the site must open correctly on a mobile phone or on a tablet, otherwise, it will be inconvenient for the user and he will fall off. Also check how the site looks in different browsers: Google Chrome, Safari, Yandex Browser, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and Edge. An unadapted website is a KPI killer.?

Competitive analysis: This is a comparative analysis of the logic and functionality of the website with top competitors - it helps to find common patterns of interaction in similar business areas. If 9 out of 10 similar online stores have common functionality, we assume that the user is used to this layout and suggest implementing it.?But within reason: for example, many have a pop-up window with a chatbot — although it often annoys the user, and does not encourage the purchase. Always look at the adequacy and effectiveness of the functionality.

Assessment of branding communication: Here it is necessary to evaluate how the design reflects the values of the brand and communicates with the user. To see how the logo is used — according to the rules or not, and how elements of corporate identity are applied. This is the most subjective and optional item for companies that do not have a full-fledged brand book or at least a guideline.?

It would be nice to constantly analyze user behavior on the website, develop analytics and work with specific indicators — especially if you are in a highly competitive field. A full-fledged large audit can be carried out once a year and a half, mini audits — every quarter. It is also useful to collect feedback from users — not only numbers are important, but also qualitative research.

By the way, if you are planning a website redesign, an audit before the development of a new version will also come in handy — this way you will better understand what has sagged, or maybe you will change your mind altogether. The fact is that customers get used to the architecture of the site and the location of the buttons — sometimes it's better not to touch them without a serious reason.

You're certainly aware that there are a ton of free audit tools available when you perform a simple search for "free website audit." While there is no harm in using these tools, they are significantly less effective than a professional audit. These online audits are generally free and provide a high-level, accurate picture of the performance of your website, they are generic, simplistic, and can be deceptive or perplexing to someone without the experienced help to correctly fix any errors they throw up.

Site audits are very helpful, but to be successful they take time and require professional direction. Although GreenPixel does not provide technical audit services, the team can help the business conduct design audits of the entire business infrastructure, not just the website.?

You can check our portfolio and book a demo here.