Website Audits: 3 Key Reasons to Do One Now

A professional technical analysis of your website can solve problems and improve your business.

Website audits are an essential process for any company with a digital presence.

Used to pinpoint the areas that need attention and/or improvement on a website, they are important because they allow companies to keep up to date with new trends and technical possibilities, and to also ensure their websites’ security and the health of their technical infrastructure.

How often audits should be undertaken depends on a number of factors, including :

• the scale and focus of your business,
• the sensitivity of your data,
• and the nature of the market you operate in.

There are a number of situations and aspects that can indicate your website is due for an audit, which we have already discussed in a previous article.

A website audit can be tailored to focus on various different aspects of your website.

It could assess the content side to ensure your content reflects the changing demands of users – and how it is ranked by Google – to a more technical focus that analyzes the security and integrity of your website’s backend, and to identify areas that can improve its performance.

At Bocasay, we undertake various kind of website audits for our clients, and have first-hand experience of how these audits can significantly improve a websites’ performance in a wide range of ways.

And no matter what the nature or area of their business, we advise them to do so for a number of key reasons:

1. Understand where you stand

The first objective of any website audit should be to evaluate all of the various assets and technical infrastructure that compose your website.

By efficiently mapping and appraising a website’s structure and content, a website auditor will be able to have a clear view of how it is operating, and what it is delivering to users. This map will then form the starting point for the technical or content-related solutions that will be chosen to improve it.

By knowing how your website works, and what it is made of, you’ll be able to have an informed view on what it needs going into the future. Improve

2. User Experience

After your website has been audited, it will be clear what :

• has been working as it should,
• what is flawed,
• and what can be improved.

By combing the site for problems such as :

• broken links,
• ‘Error 404’ pages,
• outdated pages,
• the lack of meta data,
• and a wide range of other issues that can hamper a user’s flawless navigation of your site,

then you will have a clear idea of what to fix in order to improve the experience of your visitors.

By approaching your website audit with an SEO or SXO perspective, you will also be able to improve the ranking your website will receive in Google searches, thus enhancing its reach to potential users.

3. Improve Security

A point that is all too frequently forgotten or avoided, data security continues to be an increasingly important aspect of any website’s integrity.

As data breaches continue to rise in frequency – including for small and medium sized business – ensuring that your website’s IT security is robust and continues to be updated to keep up with evolving threats from hackers and criminals is essential.

Any effective website audit will be able to undertake a full appraisal of your site’s existing security infrastructure. This will allow an auditor to understand the website’s vulnerabilities, to map out and evaluate the size of its databases, and to quantify how many attacks it might be facing on a regular basis.

By gathering this information, an IT specialist will then be able to to make an exhaustive list of the security updates required in order to bolster the website’s resilience to potential attacks.

Think your website might be due for an audit? Then it probably is. Contact us to find out how Bocasay can make it happen.