A website audit can refer to many different ways of analyzing your website, from SEO assessments to UX analysis, cloud optimizations, and code reviews.
A reasonably-priced audit can give you a boost when attempting to improve the performance of your website, and even help save you money in the long run. Website audits can also serve other purposes:
- Get a fresh pair of eyes on your website to check for gaps
- Help you plan ahead for major web projects, streamlining the process
- Get the expert opinion of a specialist
Take a look at some of the most commonly requested website audits from Atlantic BT, why they are popular, and what you can expect:
- Technical Audit
- Content Audit
- UX Audit
- SEO Audit
- Accessibility Audit
- AWS Cloud Audit
- Site Performance Audit
1. Technical Website Audit
Why are technical debt audits popular?
With accrued technical debt, you face tough decisions in regards to weighing costs and benefits. Will the amount of time, energy, and budget poured into refactoring your website’s technologies be worth it?
A technical audit can help you uncover hidden forms of debt and give you a starting point to make informed decisions.
What can I expect from a technical audit?
An overall review of your code, infrastructure, and integrations are part of a technical website audit. We can also help with a skills assessment of internal staff to make sure it lines up with the applications and infrastructure they need to support.
A technical audit on code could include several tests to manually review code, static and dynamic analysis, Linting, and unit test coverage reporting.
Atlantic BT will additionally review documentation for weaknesses and hold conversations with your internal teams around coding practices, software methodologies, CI/CD, and DevOps.
2. Content Audit
Why are content website audits popular?
A content audit is usually an early step in a website redesign. Content audits help provide clarity for what content needs to stay, where it should be placed on a new website, and what content is excessive.
These website audits not only enhance messaging and provide user information, but also shed light on opportunities for SEO and enhancements for page structure.
What can I expect from a content audit?
Traditionally, a content audit includes:
- Taking inventory of what content exists
- Analyzing the performance existing content to determine quality
- A gap analysis to find missed opportunities and build a plan for new types of digital content
Atlantic BT also ties information architecture into a content audit. That means beyond planning for new content types, we also assess the best way to categorize, structure, and optimize content for findability.
Within a content inventory spreadsheet, we also map where the content should go on the new website while providing an optimal URL structure.
3. UX Audit
Why are UX audits popular?
A UX audit is also an important step in redesigning a website. It involves evaluating an existing website’s design, messaging, and performance to drive business value.
While many businesses would like a UX audit to boost revenue, others are looking to boost efficiency for employees with their internal systems or reduce call volume by making information easier to find online.
What can I expect from a UX audit?
A UX website audit involves defining business goals, digging into user data, and gathering insights to build a plan to improve your website’s performance.
A full-scale UX audit from Atlantic BT might include:
- Compare to business objectives – the first step is to see if the page or website being evaluated does what you want it to do, from driving conversions to enhancing customer satisfaction.
- Evaluate against user objectives – next we see how well the users’ needs are met, for information or task accomplishment. We look for clarity, ease, efficiency and effectiveness.
- Heuristics evaluation – this is evaluating how well the site performs against broad-based standards of performance against expectations users have based on the best sites they use.
- Analytics and feedback – we love to ‘listen to the customer’ directly from sources like website analytics, comments and feedback from forms, customer service, or any other inputs you may have, and see what they tell us about your website.
Any website audit includes evaluating to a set of criteria; business objectives are defined through things like mission statements and OKRs – user needs are often defined by marketing personas, and so on.
We use whatever criteria you have available, or we can perform stakeholder interviews and persona workshops to help refine or update those definitions to evaluate against.
- Requirements gathering – Stakeholder interviews, surveys, and workshops
- User research – Gather customer feedback, review analytics and website behavior, create persona profiles
- User testing – Surveys, tree testing, contextual inquiries, and card sorts
- Design review – Make recommendations for design to meet industry best practices and accessibility requirements
4. SEO Audit
Why are SEO audits popular?
Without SEO specialization, it’s hard to know exactly what search engines are looking for. And there’s no tool that will single handedly spot weaknesses.
What can I expect from an SEO audit?
Atlantic BT will use a combination of tools and personalized review. We provide recommendations for the following areas:
- Technical SEO – page speed, site structure, and schema
- Content optimization – content structure and keyword optimization
- Event tracking – Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager setup
- SEO Strategy – Existing position analysis and prioritization of focus areas
5. Accessibility Audit
Why are accessibility audits popular?
Accessibility audits are important to prevent lawsuits in many sectors where accessibility is mandated by law. However, even if there is no legal risk for your business, if you aren’t making your content accessible to all, your business could still be missing out on a large population of users with disabilities. Furthermore, most accessibility UX enhancements end up being beneficial to all, providing a better user experience and positive image of your brand.
What can I expect from an accessibility website audit?
Many businesses provide accessibility audits by running a website through an automated scanner. The issue here is that there are many elements that tools cannot see.
Atlantic BT offers a comprehensive scan which includes a broad software scan, careful review by a trained professional, and a follow up consult to build a roadmap based on findings.
You can also try our WCAG color testing tool for free!
6. AWS Cloud Audit
Why are AWS cloud audits popular?
A website audit could help you optimize your current cloud environment or help you streamline a migration to be as seamless as possible.
What can I expect from an AWS cloud audit?
Cloud optimization audit
For those who already have an AWS cloud environment, a website audit will help take full advantage of the services purchased and eliminate whatever is unnecessary.
Atlantic BT will collaborate with your IT team over several calls, review code (or review infrastructure with read-only access), and provide a consult to review findings.
Cloud migration audit
On the other hand, others may be looking for a website audit to help them access their situation and plan for a migration. Atlantic BT will gather workloads and business requirements, determine which AWS services will best support your business (keeping efficiency in mind), and create a plan to test and securely migrate data.
7. Site Performance Audit
Why are site performance audits popular?
When your website loads quickly, it ranks higher on search engines and boosts conversions after users land. Not to mention, Google rewards ads connected to fast websites.
As the benefits of fast websites become widely known, your competitors are beginning to invest in page speed optimization. They are now better equipped to “out-perform” you in every sense!
What can I expect from a website performance audit?
There are many free tools to help you scan your website for performance issues. After using a vetted tool to scan your website, Atlantic BT will:
- Review the recommendations and prioritize based on impact and effort
- Build a roadmap to help you start implementing these optimizations
- If you wish – proceed with the implementation and continue to monitor and test results
Ready to get started?
If you need some help but aren’t sure if a website audit would benefit you, we’ll get you on the right track with a free consultation. We’ve been building websites since 1998 and thus have 25 years of experience identifying the key issues that are holding websites back from outperforming their competitors.
