Why You Need a Website Audit

We’ve gotten lots of rain lately which only means one thing… it’s spring at least until the end of May. This is a Texas thing where spring disappears in June and hotter temperatures are here to stay until October. Dresses, shorts and tanks season is officially here!

If you’re doing spring cleaning this is a great time to go through your digital clutter and products including your website. Here’s why doing a website audit is a good idea for your business.

Parts of your website break

You’re excited to buy a product. Dopamine spikes. You’ve never wanted anything else so much in your life. You click the link… and it’s a dud. Leads to nowhere. What do you do?

If you’re like me, you search out the company and product name. You make it to their website or placeholder site, find another link and get the dreaded 404 error page.

You’re quickly losing patience and abandon your search altogether.

I’m all too familiar with this scenario. Even when I’m really determined to find something because I like it so much if it’s impossible to purchase I feel like I did all this work for nothing.

It’s a horrible feeling and just as annoying on the customer side as it is for the company. Your potential customer lost enthusiasm for the product and the brand lost a potential sale. Lose lose.

The way to prevent this is the tedious but necessary task of clicking on all your important links and buttons on your site to make sure they are still working. Thankfully you can hire someone to do this one for you.

You find site errors

Proofreading is important but I’m not going to tell you to re-read all the words on your website, especially if you have blog posts.

It is a good idea to at least skim over your main pages. Hopefully you would have found any errors before but it’s better than never finding them at all.

Things to look for are spelling errors, incorrect punctuation and things that just don’t make sense. Use your common sense for this one. If you’re writing style is super casual and friendly you don’t have to be so rigid with the grammar on your site. I’m not here to be your English teacher.

An easy way to test this out is having someone you know who doesn’t look at your website all the time scroll through and see if anything obvious pops out at them. Usually when we see something so often we start to skim over it not really noticing any changes or errors.

I’ve seen a few websites where the client or company hasn’t done a quick scroll through and there was still things like lorem ipsum on the homepage which is placeholder text that needs to be replaced with real words! A website audit could have prevented a potential client from thinking you’re unprofessional and choosing someone else.

You find things to revamp or update

Our sites should be growing and evolving with us. Maybe a call to action isn’t hitting as well as it used to or you notice something else you want to change. This is one of many reasons why I enjoy creating websites. The technology is constantly evolving and I’m excited to keep learning about it.

Maybe you want to try featuring one of your new products or offers on your homepage. I also like to change up my images every once in awhile. Whether they are brand photos or stock images doing a minimal refresh can help you feel like your website and brand are a better reflection of you and your company.

Things that are always in need of an update are testimonials, media and social media posts. These things are usually updating more often then we remember which means it’s a good idea to have a reoccurring time to do updates to keep your website fresh.

When looking for things to tweak or change slightly it will all be dependent on you. What are some things you want to try that are slightly different? The great thing about using Squarespace is it’s so easy to make changes and updates and just as easy to change them back or cancel them out. Wordpress websites could never.

How often should you do website audits?

Keeping up with updates can be overwhelming. My advice if you’re a DIY web designer which means you’re doing it all yourself is to set a calendar event or reminder every 2-3 months to do simple updates. For more complicated projects you’ll want to schedule more time in the future and reserve those for every 6 months to yearly.

You don’t want to constantly be making changes on your website unless you love doing it. Then you might be a web designer!

If you want someone else to do the website audit heavy lifting for you check out my VIP days. Combing through sites all day is what I do!