What to Do If Your Website Audit Uncovers Major Issues

So, you’ve just run a free audit on your WordPress website, hoping to get a clean bill of health. Instead, you’ve discovered a laundry list of major issues. Don’t panic! We are to help you when a website audit uncovers major issues.

Whether you’re facing security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, or SEO pitfalls, we’ve got you covered with practical advice and resources to get your site back on track. Let’s dive in and turn those challenges into opportunities for improvement.

What is the purpose of a website audit?

A website audit systematically reviews a website’s performance across various dimensions, aiming to identify areas for improvement. The primary purpose is to enhance user experience, search engine optimization (SEO), and overall site effectiveness.

This includes analyzing technical aspects like site speed, mobile responsiveness, and security, as well as content quality, keyword usage, and link structure. By identifying weaknesses and opportunities, a website audit helps businesses optimize their site to improve visibility, functionality, and user engagement. Ultimately driving better performance and achieving business goals.

Understanding the Results of Your Audit

You need to be able to understand the results of your website audit to make strategic moves with your site. This involves analyzing data on site speed, user engagement, SEO metrics, and security vulnerabilities to identify areas for improvement. With this knowledge, you can prioritize actions like optimizing content, enhancing user experience, and fixing technical issues. Ultimately, this understanding empowers you to make strategic decisions that align with your goals, driving better traffic, conversion rates, and overall site effectiveness.

What are the key metrics to focus on?

Let’s explore some of the key metrics to focus on when looking at your website audit report.

Site Speed and Performance

When conducting a free website audit, site speed, and performance are critical metrics for evaluating the overall user experience and SEO effectiveness. Site speed measures how quickly a web page loads, including the time it takes for content to appear and for users to interact.

Key performance indicators include Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Fast-loading pages enhance user satisfaction, reduce bounce rates, and improve engagement. In contrast, sluggish performance can deter visitors and lower search engine rankings.

Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Lighthouse analyze these aspects, offering insights into areas needing optimization. Some of the areas that may need optimization include image compression, caching, and script management, to boost website efficiency and visibility.

Search engine optimization factors

Search engine optimization (SEO) stands as a pivotal metric for evaluating a site’s visibility and ranking potential in search engine results pages. SEO encompasses various aspects, including keyword usage, meta descriptions, title tags, alt text, and URL structure. Therefore, ensuring that content is discoverable and relevant to users’ search queries.

Key metrics analyzed include keyword rankings, on-page SEO factors, backlink profiles, and content quality. Effective SEO leads to improved organic traffic, better user engagement, and higher search engine rankings, making it essential for a site’s success.

Tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Ahrefs provide actionable insights into SEO performance. They help in highlighting areas for improvement like keyword optimization, content gaps, and technical SEO issues. All of these areas collectively enhance a site’s competitiveness and user reach.

Security issues

Security issues are another major factor that you need to pay attention to when reading your website audit report. This involves identifying vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious actors, such as:

• outdated software,
• weak passwords,
• insecure data transmission,
• and inadequate encryption practices.

A thorough audit will assess the website’s compliance with security standards. It will check for the presence of malware or unauthorized access points, and ensure that proper security protocols are in place to protect sensitive user information.

Addressing these security issues is crucial as they can significantly impact the site’s integrity, user trust, and overall reputation, making it a top priority in any comprehensive website audit.

Mobile Usability

When conducting a free website audit, a key metric to focus on is mobile usability. This metric evaluates how well a website performs on mobile devices, considering factors such as loading speed, responsive design, ease of navigation, and overall user experience on smaller screens.

Given the increasing prevalence of mobile internet usage, ensuring that a website is optimized for mobile is crucial. A thorough audit will identify issues like:

• slow load times
• improper display of content
• and touch interface problems

which can defer mobile users. By prioritizing mobile usability, the audit helps ensure that the website is accessible and functional for a broad audience. Ultimately, enhancing user engagement and satisfaction.

Website Audit Uncovers Major Issues – Categorizing them

Once you have gone over your website audit it’s time to categorize issues to slowly begin work on improving your website for your users.

Critical vs. Non-Critical Issues

One way we can categorize issues that come about from a comprehensive website audit is critical issues vs non-critical issues. Critical issues are those that significantly impact the website’s functionality, user experience, or search engine ranking. These issues require immediate attention to prevent substantial negative consequences.

Non-critical issues, on the other hand, are less urgent and may not drastically affect the website’s performance or user satisfaction, but addressing them can still enhance the overall quality and effectiveness of the site.

• Critical Issue Example 1: Broken Links. These can lead to a poor user experience, as visitors encounter 404 errors when trying to access certain pages. This can increase bounce rates and reduce the time users spend on the site, ultimately hurting search engine rankings.
• Critical Issue Example 2: Slow-loading pages. Slow page load times frustrate users and can lead to higher abandonment rates. Additionally, search engines like Google use page load speed as a ranking factor, so slow pages can negatively affect the site’s SEO performance.
• Non-Critical Issues Example: Minor CSS Errors. While these might slightly affect the visual presentation of the website, they usually don’t impede functionality, or user experience to a significant degree. These issues can be scheduled for fixing as part of routine maintenance without immediate urgency.

By distinguishing between critical and non-critical issues, webmasters and developers can prioritize their efforts to ensure the website remains functional, user-friendly, and optimized for search engines.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Fixes

You can also prioritize issues indicated from the website audit process in terms of short-term vs long-term fixes. Short-term fixes are issues that can be addressed quickly and with relatively minimal effort. It’s often providing immediate improvements to the website’s functionality or user experience.

Here are some examples of short-term fixes:

• Fixing Typos and Grammatical Errors. Correcting these errors can be done quickly and enhances the professionalism and credibility of the website, improving the user experience immediately.
• Optimizing Image Sizes. Reducing the size of large images can quickly improve page load times, which enhances user experience and can positively impact search engine rankings.

Long-term fixes, on the other hand, require more substantial time, resources, or structural changes to the website but are crucial for sustained performance and growth. Some examples of long-term fixes may include:

• Re-designing the Website Layout. A complete redesign might be necessary to improve navigation, user engagement, and overall aesthetics, but it requires a significant investment of time and resources.
• Implementing a Content Management System (CMS). Migrating to a robust CMS can streamline content updates, improve scalability, and offer better security and functionality, but it involves a substantial overhaul of the existing infrastructure.

By categorizing issues into short-term and long-term fixes, website owners can create a structured plan to address immediate concerns quickly while also planning for more comprehensive improvements that will benefit the site in the long run.

Immediate steps to take when Website Audit Uncovers Major Issues

Now let’s dive into the steps that you need to take when a website audit uncovers major issues. Some of these steps include prioritizing fixes, enhancing site performance, improving SEO and so much more. Learn details of these steps and more, below.

Prioritizing Critical Fixes

You and your development team need to sit down and make a timeline that helps you prioritize critical fixes. So we briefly went over that you should group your fixes into critical vs non-critical and you decide to break that down even further from short-term to long-term. It would help if you started fixing critical issues such as security issues. You should address any security vulnerabilities as these pose the greatest risk to your site’s integrity and user trust.

Additionally, consider the potential impact on user experience and functionality when prioritizing other critical fixes. Thus ensuring that the most pressing issues are resolved promptly to maintain site performance and reliability.

Enhance Site Performance

Another key step is enhancing site performance to make sure that your web pages load in less than 2 seconds to optimize user experience. Start by analyzing your site’s current loading times and identifying elements that cause delays, such as large images, unoptimized code, or excessive plugins.

Implement strategies such as compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and minimizing JavaScript and CSS files. Additionally, consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce server response times and improve load speeds for users across different geographical locations.

By focusing on these performance improvements, you can significantly reduce bounce rates, increase user satisfaction, and potentially boost your site’s search engine rankings.

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Improve SEO Fundamentals & search engine rankings

Improving SEO fundamentals and search engine optimization after a website audit should be another step in the process. Begin by addressing any technical SEO issues identified during the audit, such as broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags.

Ensure that your website’s structure is optimized for search engines by improving site navigation and implementing a clear, logical hierarchy. Focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that incorporates targeted keywords to boost your visibility in search results.

Additionally, optimize on-page elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags to enhance relevance and click-through rates. By systematically improving these SEO fundamentals, you can significantly enhance your site’s search engine rankings, driving more organic traffic and increasing your online visibility.

Addressing Long-Term Issues

You need to make time to address long-term issues such as content strategy, technical SEO, improving mobile experiences, and much more.

Content Strategy

You need to ensure good content quality to stand out among competitors. It’s not enough just to post a few blogs and leave it at that. You should be consistently improving and growing your content. A robust content strategy involves consistently improving and expanding your content to engage your audience and meet their evolving needs.

This means regularly updating existing content to maintain its relevance and accuracy, as well as producing new, diverse types of content that cater to various segments of your audience.

Here are a few tips to enhance your content strategy:

• Conduct regular content quality audits. This will help you identify gaps, outdated information, and areas for improvement. This ensures your content remains relevant and valuable to your audience.
• Implement best SEO practices on your site. Optimize your content by incorporating relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and internal linking. This improves your visibility and attracts organic traffic.
• Consider using various content formats. Experiment with different types of content such as videos, infographics, podcasts, and interactive content. This not only caters to different preferences but also keeps your audience engaged and returning for more.

By implementing these strategies, you can create a dynamic content landscape that not only attracts but also retains your audience, fostering long-term engagement and growth.

Technical SEO Enhancements

A technical SEO audit will also help you enhance your site. This process involves optimizing various technical aspects of your website to ensure it meets search engine guidelines and provides a smooth user experience.

Key tasks include:

• fixing broken links,
• improving site speed,
• optimizing meta tags and headers.

Also, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and implementing structured data markup. These enhancements not only help search engines crawl and index your site more effectively. But also, enhance user satisfaction by providing faster load times and easier navigation.

By prioritizing technical SEO improvements, businesses can boost their organic search rankings and attract more qualified traffic. This way you can ultimately achieve your digital marketing goals more effectively.

Improving Mobile Experience

Another important aspect that you should focus on is improving the mobile experience for your users. It’s crucial that websites work well and look good on smaller screens. To make sure a website is better on mobile, it’s helpful to simplify the design and make sure buttons and links are easy to tap. You may consider a mobile-first design, to ensure you prioritize your site on mobile devices. The goal is to make the experience of your website on a desktop and mobile device equal. There shouldn’t be any missing content, CTAs, forms, etc.

Also, websites should load quickly on phones, so images and videos should be optimized to load fast even on slower connections. A slow-loading website will frustrate users and ultimately cause them to click out of the website and move on to your competitor.

Therefore, making these changes can make a big difference in how people enjoy using a website on their phones.

Ongoing Monitoring and Maintenance after Website Audit Uncovers Major Issues

Finally, you should be constantly monitoring and maintaining your WordPress site to make sure that any issues that do come up, are tackled and dealt with sooner rather than later. You should monitor your site’s activity logs and access logs. You only want to give people access to your WordPress dashboard that need it.

Also, you should maintain your site by doing regular updates of your WordPress core, WordPress plugins, and themes. These updates will help keep your site running smoothly. Moreover, with each patch, you will usually gain security patches to keep your site safe from any potential vulnerabilities such as hackers, bots, and viruses.

Another task that you should take on as part of this process is creating backups for your site on a regular and cyclical basis. This way in case something happens with your site, you can quickly restore it. Backups should be done manually, with the help of a plugin, and through your web hosting provider.

Some other monitoring and maintenance tasks may include:

• QA testing & testing automation for any changes on your site
• Fixing bugs and errors that may have resulted from an update
• Uptime monitoring
• Hosting and domain management.

All these steps can help you avoid future issues with your website.

When to Consider Professional help when Website Audit Uncovers Major Issues?

Do you feel overwhelmed? Are you in over your head? Do you not have the technical know-how to handle these issues? Or perhaps you don’t have the manpower to spend on website issues? Possibly your core business activities take higher priority than your website.

If you answered yes to any of these, it may be time to look into professional help with your WordPress site. Here at Acclaim, we offer unlimited WordPress support services that can help you fix your site after a website audit.

We can go through the website audit with you and help develop a plan to help implement changes that will be beneficial to your site. Our development team offers various plans to ensure that you can meet your website goals. You will have peace of mind that your site is taken care of and running smoothly.

TL;DR: Recapping what to do when Website Audit Uncovers Major Issues

A website audit is a comprehensive review of your website to evaluate its performance, SEO, security, and usability. The purpose of this audit is to identify any issues that may hinder your website’s effectiveness and to provide a roadmap for improvements. When a free WordPress website audit uncovers major issues, it’s essential to act swiftly and strategically to address them.

Key Metrics to Consider:

• Site Speed and Performance: Slow loading times can drive visitors away and affect your search engine rankings.
• SEO Factors: Proper optimization ensures your website is discoverable and ranks well on search engines.
• Security Issues: Protecting your site from vulnerabilities and breaches is crucial.
• Mobile Usability: Ensuring a seamless experience for mobile users is essential, as a significant portion of traffic comes from mobile devices.

Steps to Take When Major Issues Are Uncovered:

• Prioritizing Critical Fixes: Address the most severe problems first to prevent further damage or loss of traffic.
• Enhance Site Performance: Optimize images, leverage browser caching, and use a content delivery network (CDN).
• Improve SEO Fundamentals: Update meta tags, improve keyword usage, and ensure proper site structure.

Addressing Long-Term Issues:

• Content Strategy: Develop and execute a plan for regular, high-quality content updates.
• Technical SEO Enhancements: Implement advanced SEO techniques like schema markup and fixing crawl errors.
• Improving Mobile Experience: Ensure your site is fully responsive and mobile-friendly.
• Ongoing Monitoring and Maintenance: Regularly check for issues and update your site to keep it running smoothly.

Taking proactive steps to address these issues not only improves your website’s performance but also enhances user experience and drives more traffic.

If your free website audit has revealed significant issues, don’t worry—we’re here to help! Take advantage of our comprehensive WordPress support to fix these problems and keep your site running at its best. For more details, drop us a line today, and let’s get started on optimizing your website!