Step 2: Perform a Website Redesign Audit
Although you may know what is informing your website’s redesign, conducting a professional audit unveils a lot more that is affecting it. A redesign audit will give insights into the performance of:
1. Call to action references
2. Website Traffic
3. Menus and navigation
4. SERP performance
5. Security of the website
6. Site architecture
7. Domain ownership and registration
Factors to Consider in a Website Redesign Audit
SEO
When performing a website redesign SEO audit, the following considerations are critical:
Are your pages optimized for the right keyword?
Are the links on your website relevant?
How about your anchor texts? Do they contain descriptive keyword
Is there any potential for penalties, or is your website already penalized by google?
Blue Hills Digital has a detailed website audit checklist here.
Content
Google penalizes duplicate content. Also, your content may be original but lack proper syntax (grammar, punctuations, spellings, and plagiarism), affecting ranking. A website redesign audit will help discover your content’s uniqueness and optimize it for search engines.
Navigation
Google crawls your website to index pages. Easy navigation of your website helps Google determine which pages to index. Otherwise, google will end up indexing pages that were not supposed to be indexed at all, lowering your rank in search engines.
Architecture
Inappropriate use of JavaScript and CSS elements can cripple the performance of your website. Google will appreciate and reward a structured architecture for your website as it will be easy to understand the content and choose the pages to index correctly.
Usability
The goal of every website is to help your audience find the content they are looking for within the shortest time, and a website audit will help you discover users’ behavior on your website.
Credibility
Google crawls the content on your website to determine how trustworthy your content is from the user’s perspective. Security of your domain, your audience’s privacy, and related factors that are questionable to google can be identified during a website redesign audit.
Functionality
Generally, an easy-to-use interface and website responsiveness are critical functionalities—the speed of your website and links. You want to create a valuable platform with minimum user effort, and a website audit will help discover the website’s functionality details.