The ultimate guide to auditing websites

Are you looking for a complete, easy-to-follow guide on how to audit websites? Well bookmark this page, because here is everything you need to know.

We’ll explain why website audits matter, identify some common goals, and show you a step-by-step process for executing them (the CAPRI framework).

By the end of this guide, you’ll be a website auditing wizard, ready to dive into projects big or small. Let’s get started.

Contents

• Why are website audits so important?

• Defining your website audit goal

• A simple step-by-step plan for your website audit

• Crawl your website

• Assess all issues

• Prioritize the biggest issues

• Recommend changes to stakeholders

• Implementing and measuring the results

• Final thoughts on how to succeed

Why are website audits so important?

Imagine that some years ago you built a perfect hotel for vacationers to have a relaxing and enjoyable stay in. The building work was impeccable, the rooms were adequately sized and thoughtfully laid out, and the decoration was dazzlingly stylish. Everything was ideal, your guests had a great time, and nothing could be improved!

Well, what if over the years you forgot to check if everything was still suitable? The needs of your guests changed, there’s not enough space anymore, the plumbing got leaky, and your once-stylish trimmings became dowdy years ago. Things started to fall in disarray and hotel visitor numbers started to decline.

If it’s not being assessed and monitored, your website could end up in ruin like my poorly-maintained hotel! In today’s vast digital world, it’s crucial to provide the highest quality website experience possible, or else potential visitors and customers could leave and seek out other businesses.

Figure 1: Similar to maintenance work on a hotel, your website also needs regular review and maintenance.

Website audits ensure you catch any problems, locate potential to grow even more, and create prioritized action plans to get improvements made effectively.

Ultimately, these audits keep you on track to achieve your digital goals, whether that’s new revenue, more visitors, brand loyalty, or whichever KPI needs attention.

Defining your website audit goal

Later on, I’ll be detailing a comprehensive audit process to get you started. It’s worth knowing that every audit you create and present should be customized to the recipient’s expertise and role, the website’s size (larger websites can take a lot longer to fully audit) and what the domain’s primary purpose is (what is important for an online shop isn’t always necessary for a magazine, for example).

Another huge factor that impacts what kind of audit you’ll be running is the expectations of your client or stakeholder. Understanding this at a very early stage is paramount, as it will determine how long you need and what focus should be taken. Below I’ve listed some example audit goals to become familiar with (the names can be changed of course):

Express Evaluation 🔎

This type of audit is perfect if the recipient is a new client/stakeholder who isn’t so skilled in the ways of digital marketing or web development. A quick website evaluation involves taking a speedy glance at content and technical assets to get a better idea of which area or pillar makes the most sense to focus on in another deeper analysis. This is recommended if the client isn’t yet certain of what love and care their domain needs.

SEO Survey 🤖

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audits are necessary for domains that wish to gain more traffic and revenue via organic search results. Ranking in popular Search Engines like Google requires being a relevant and high-quality resource, while also making sure content is easily accessible by analyzing crawlers and bots.

Therefore these types of audits cover a multitude of topics, ranging from keyword research to search performance analytics, content quality checks, technical status, and more.

Content Control 📝

Content (words, images, videos etc) that you host on your website gives you a better chance of resonating with your ideal audience, and builds up a relationship that can result in more incoming traffic and customers.

Content Control audits therefore involve keyword and topic research to uncover gaps not yet targeted, and assess the quality of existing resources to locate any necessary improvements.

These audits can require qualitative judgements and creativity, consideration of the entire customer journey, and are ideal for smaller businesses looking to grow with the help of a content strategy.

Performance Proof ⚡

This audit specifically makes sure that all assets and resources on your website are fast, stable, and functional. Slow pages cause frustration for users and result in high exit rates and low conversions, so a Performance Proof audit is important to carry out to keep optimizing this important Website UX pillar.

These types of audits are usually more technically advanced, and normally require developer support for implementation.

Accessibility Analysis ♿

Making your web pages accessible for all is important for the good of your incoming visitors, as well as for the state of the web. It ensures that anyone can use your website, no matter their ability, preferred device, location, or language.

An audit with these topics in mind will focus on UX and web design fundamentals, so make sure to involve those teams to get improvements underway.

Website UX Discovery 🌈

For established domains that are eager to achieve more success online, a holistic Website UX discovery audit can be an ideal action to take, as it focuses on the 6 core pillars of optimal websites: SEO, Quality Assurance, Performance, Accessibility, Compliance, and Sustainability.

This type of analysis can take longer to complete as there are many areas to address, but it gives you crucial insights into any chinks in your website armor, and reveals which pillars are the weakest.

Implementing learnings from this kind of analysis normally involves a joint effort between web development, design, digital marketing, and other website-centric teams, which is why prioritization is a very important step.

A simple step-by-step plan for your website audit

Please try not to be too overwhelmed by all the different types of audits possible! Whereas they have different outcomes and focus areas, the steps you need to take to achieve those learnings will be similar.

In this section I’d like to guide you through a simple framework for creating comprehensive and focused website analyses, and I’ve named it the CAPRI Framework (whether it reminds you of the Italian island, stylish pants, or a childhood juice drink doesn’t matter too much!).

CAPRI stands for Crawling, Assessment, Prioritization, Recommendation, and Implementation. It summarizes each crucial step needed to create stunning website audits.

Figure 2: The CAPRI framework

Let’s dig into each of those steps below so that you can master their individual steps!

1. Crawling your website

Crawling is a process carried out by Search Engine bots and site analysis tools (like Ryte!) in order to analyze many aspects of a website, from its style and content, to its technical behaviour and the way it’s all linked together.

Imagine a crawler as being like a spider that travels from page to page via links, and gathers information about each page along its journey.

How to start a website crawl:

1. Choose your favourite website crawler. Mine is Ryte of course, but there are others available such as Screaming Frog and Sitebulb (which crawl locally, i.e. on your PC) or DeepCrawl (which, like us, crawls from the cloud). If you want to work alongside me in this guide, head over here to book a demo and start using Ryte. Find more info on how to start a crawl in our help center.

2. Enter your exact homepage address, including the right protocol (e.g. https://) and subdomain (e.g. www.). The crawler discovers content via links, and as the homepage is usually the best connected page it makes sense to begin here. Entering the wrong address could therefore result in incorrect results.

3. Select mobile or desktop crawling, depending on the type of audit you’d like to run. As we live in a Mobile First world, I would suggest you use the Mobile user-agent if you have to choose only one, but it can also be a good idea to run two crawls and compare the results for parity issues.

4. Configure the crawler’s basic settings, to make sure it’s in tune with your site’s technical set-up. Crawlers will keep discovering and chomping information until they can’t find any more, so sometimes it makes sense to restrict their journey a little bit. In the crawler settings you can define simple rules like a URL limit, whether the crawler should analyze JavaScript, if it should crawl subdomains, and more.

5. (Advanced) Set up advanced settings and choose which parts of your website to exclude from the crawl. If you maintain huge websites then your crawl results might cover parts of the website that aren’t so necessary to analyze, like pages with tracking parameters or with sorting filters applied. You should consider which pages or subfolders should be excluded from the crawl, to make the reports as relevant as possible. P.S. advanced auditors can also take advantage of other expert features such as custom robots.txt settings, authentication, and so on.

6. Start the crawl! If you aren’t completely sure yet that those settings are ideal, simply run a small test crawl, e.g. 5% of your website size to check everything worked – you can always tweak the settings for the next crawl in the Project Settings. The time to finish a crawl depends on your URL budget and website infrastructure, but a normal-sized website of around 10,000 pages should take a couple of hours.

2. Assessing the results

When the crawling has finished, you’ll receive a quick report in your inbox that summarizes the key learnings it detected, and enables you to start off an analysis quickly and on the right track.

The next best place to start in Ryte is the Issues Overview, which prioritizes optimizations based on how impactful they will be for the site’s current health.

Figure 3: The Ryte issue overview provides a first overview of website issues and their priority

Analysis results can be quite overwhelming at first glance, so take some time to become more familiar with each of the recommended tasks, before exploring it further. And if you’re new to auditing websites, Ryte explains what each problem is, why it’s an issue, and how you can ideally fix it.

Figure 4: Use the explanations in each report to better understand website issues

When visiting the report, you’ll be presented with a list of affected URLs that will be ordered and sorted depending on the type of fix necessary. For example, the “Broken Pages” report shows you all the incoming links pointing to that broken page so that you can visit them and remove the link, or update it to point to a working URL. Again, if you need any support in those reports, simply click the question mark icon and an explanation will appear.

Rytebot seeks out 40 important website issues in total, but from the main navigation on the left side you can also explore loads of areas that give you ideal optimization recommendations.

Here are some of the most common yet frustrating issues to be investigated when assessing the crawl results:

Over time, you’ll know exactly where to find each issue and which are the most important ones to address.However, the problem is that you simply can’t fix everything!

Optimizing websites costs time and resources, so you need to really pick your battles here, even for businesses that have a lot of developers and marketing power. Presenting large lists of tasks to clients overwhelms them, and doesn’t give enough information about the severity of the issue. This is why prioritization is a key part of your auditing process and probably the most important.

3. Prioritizing fixes and optimizations

In this third step, we’re going to turn our list of results into a really structured audit report that clients can effectively work with. You will have already started prioritizing issues based on hints from Ryte, but we’re going to go the extra mile and… prioritize the prioritizations!

Implementing a fix costs resources, which all comes down to money. If a developer needs to spend three days working on a fix, that’s three days they could have spent building a shiny new feature that attracts more customers, so management will always question what outcome website improvements will have on incoming revenue. In other words, what will be the return on investment (or ROI) for this fix?

I come from the SEO world where calculating ROI is incredibly difficult to perfect, mainly due to Google’s machine learning and algorithms making it impossible to be certain on what will lead to more clicks and conversions.

This is why huge and pricey fixes should always be tested first on a smaller amount of pages before rolled out fully. As a little tip, curious marketers should check out our SEO A/B testing feature to really experiment with confidence.

Figure 5: Use Rytes SEO A/B testing feature to reliably evaluate optimization measures

With that being said, by gathering confirmed ranking factors, proven UX best practices, and years of existing research, it’s possible to build cases around your recommended website iterations. Try to always consider what impact a change is intended to have on incoming revenue, traffic, and its scale.

Because of this, it’s very important that you are equipped with as much evidence and ammunition as you can get – so be sure to get access to the site’s Google Search Console and Google Analytics properties (or other traffic analysis tools).

In Ryte, you can assess how well organic traffic is performing, find potential for even more growth, and see which pages are really struggling to get incoming visitors because of poor website UX. Even if SEO isn’t a focus for the website you’re auditing, good rankings in Google are the outcome of high-quality websites, so I like to see organic traffic as a sign of quality either way. You should also connect your Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts to Ryte to add another prioritization dimension in website issue reports. Then the crawl details can be backed up by analytics data, and it’s easy to sort broken page fixes by incoming sessions and slow pages by bounce rate, for example.

With this information, you can better judge what impact your endorsed iterations will have based on revenue and traffic. To help organize findings and their impacts, feel free to borrow my handy Google Sheets template. Here each impact has a weighting and will calculate the priority based on the impact.

Figure 6: Template for prioritizing your website issues

You can skip this step if you are already wise in the ways of priority judgement! However, the next one is definitely a must. Whereas some updates have a high priority, they may require a lot of time and energy to implement, so you need to consider both dimensions to reach a final action plan. For this, I like to create very simple impact vs effort matrices that will be used in presenting to clients or management.

Figure 7: When prioritizing website improvements, you should consider both the impact and the effort involved

You can map tasks to each quadrant, from “high impact & low effort” quick wins (everyone loves those), to the important tasks that require more time and consideration as a “high impact, high effort” project.

“Low impact but low effort” tasks are more filler topics that can be done, for example, at the end of a sprint when all important tasks have been completed. Finally there are the “low impact, high effort” tasks that can go in the bin – and stay in the bin.

4. Recommending changes to primary stakeholders

By now you should have a lovely prioritized list of tasks for your website to succeed, but it’s not quite a fully fledged audit yet. You need to plan out all potential solutions and suggest them in order of impact and effort required.

If you’re working for your own website, you should already know what kind of technology your website uses and will have a good idea of how to resolve problems, but those of you working for clients should raise this question early on in the audit process. Here are some important questions to ask them:

• What content management system(s) does the website use? This way you can recommend out-of-the-box solutions like plugins that they can easily switch on and configure. If they’re not sure, you could do a quick check with BuiltWith which shows you all the current technologies in use by the page.

• What significant website changes have been made in the past? Did they have the desired outcome? This will give you insights into which topics might have been botched or successful, so you don’t need to go down any rabbit holes or point out the obvious in your audit.

• Were there any major website updates like a relaunch? This is very important to know when you’re digging into analytics data and figuring out unexpected changes in KPIs.

• How do you normally work with website stakeholders? Ideally, there is a ticketing system or project management tool in place that you should consider in your audit.

When you have all of this information, you can create an effective, empowering  website audit that takes their very specific situation into account. Having audited hundreds of websites myself, I can safely say that every set-up was different, so churning out a list of generic issues and fixes won’t provide a good service.

Something else to also bear in mind here is that even though there may be best practices in existence, and you might have engineered what you believe to be the best solution to a website issue, developers and product owners will likely have a better understanding of what works best for the current website. Always remember to suggest and recommend solutions, rather than dictate and micromanage.

With all of this in mind, formulate a report with your findings, screenshots, links to reports (yes, you can add your client as a user to your Ryte account if you wish!), descriptions, and your proposed solutions. This deliverable should go together with URL exports and technical data, so that everything can be accessed for the roll-out phase.

Figure 8: You can easily share your Ryte projects or individual reports with your team

When presenting your findings and recommendations, set up a meeting to go through the results with the stakeholders, and use very simple and clear slides created with the audience in mind. Don’t inundate C-level folk with technical details!

Be very high level in your explanations and always communicate the value of suggested tasks and strategies. If they want a detailed run through, they can check the report.

5. Implementing and measuring the results

Because of your outstanding audit, fixes and changes will start rolling out. How involved you are in this process really depends.

• If you did a one-off audit for a client, everything is in their hands now.

• If you’re working with a client on retainer, then you also won’t be getting your hands dirty with website changes. However, it’s still really important to stay on track of all iterations and outcomes, so that you can prove the benefit of your auditing efforts and continue to guide them.

• If you’re working on your own website, then it’s up to you to manage those projects and oversee their delivery, potentially even fixing things yourself and being able to witness the fruits of your labour.

To effectively do this, you need to document each major website improvement in a relevant format, such as a shared document or on a project management tool like Confluence, Notion etc.

Figure 9: Add custom events to your Organic Search Reports to track when changes were made.

And one more top tip: remember to make annotations to your organic traffic reports by adding Custom Events (see screenshot above), and create Segments for all pages that received that fix.

This means you can report any impact and developments to focus KPIs, not just to prove that you’re a good website UX auditor, but to help secure more resources for future iterations.

Of course, not every stakeholder needs access to your toolset, as they won’t always have time to take a look at the reports. Create weekly or monthly reports for stakeholders that display the results, or export overviews and reports as a PDF that you can send to them and explain any movements.

Final thoughts on how to succeed

There is no “single best way” to audit a website. Investigations can range from very quick checks to really in-depth, holistic analyses that span multiple weeks. However, there are some key factors to remember that every good audit needs to be:

• Prioritized: Always, always order recommendations based on the outcome they will have on a business’s goals and overall growth. Not every single topic needs to be raised in the first audit, too. Try to build a strategy and roadmap based on the highest necessities.

• User-centric: Always communicate a change with the intended effect it will have on user KPIs. Rather than “Compressing these images will increase page speed.”, include the benefit for their website visitors, e.g. “We will reduce exit rates and increase conversions with faster pages. We can achieve that by compressing images.”

• Audience aware: Learn how to read the room, and prepare audits and reports for the correct stakeholders. A CMO does not need to hear you talk about individual technical issues for an hour, and web developers don’t need to be told what an HTTP status code is.

If you follow these guiding points, our simple CAPRI framework, and the overall goal of working towards a perfect Website User Experience, you’ll become a website auditing professional in no time! Happy Optimizing :)