Marketing Quick Tip: 21 Items to Include in Your Website Audit

Did you know that the average lifespan of a successful business website is less than 3 years? Why so short?

Because users’ needs and habits change, technology becomes outdated, and brands grow and evolve. If your brand is overdue for a website upgrade, don’t just throw everything out and start blindly from scratch. Instead, the first step should be a Website Redesign Audit: taking a critical eye to your currently site and using its strengths and weaknesses to develop a plan for improvement.

The key elements to review fall into three categories: current metrics, technical elements and design elements. Here’s quick look at what you, or a partner agency, should be looking for in each category:

Website metrics/benchmark data

1. Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)

2. Bounce rate (monthly average)

3. Time on site (monthly average)

4. Top performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic and lead generation)

5. Number of inbound linking domains

6. Total number of new leads/form submissions (per month)

7. Total number of sales generated (per month)

8. Total number of pages indexed

9. Total number of pages that receive traffic

Having these metrics collected provides a starting point from which to set goals for your new website strategy and can also point out areas in which your site may be falling far short of industry benchmarks—try to determine why your site struggles in those areas.

Technical elements

Give each page (or at least each primary navigation page and the templates of recurring pages, such as product or blog pages) a score of 1-10 and note what should be corrected for each of these elements.

1. Search engine optimization (keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, etc.)

2. Technical issues (redirects, XML sitemaps, etc.)

3. Site speed

4. Mobile experience

5. Analytics

6. Lead generation (calls-to-action, forms, etc.)

 Design elements

Again, review each individual page or page template with a critical eye toward items to fix regarding the following:

1. Logos

2. Brand colors

3. Typography

4. Images/Graphics/Videos

5. Template/Layout

6. UX/UI

It can be challenging to truly look at our own websites with an impartial eye but doing so is essential to see what your visitors see (rather than what you have grown accustomed to seeing). If having a third-party take that critical look for you, and then support development of the new-and-improved version, would be better, let’s talk. Our founder and CEO Kristin Jones would love to talk with you about how JONES can partner with you to audit your existing website and guide development of your next version. Schedule a time to talk with her today.

If you feel confident in tackling the job in-house, you can download the same audit template and checklist we use—ready for your data, scores and notes. You’ll find it here: Website Redesign Audit Template. It has been downloaded by nearly 150 marketers in 2022 alone.