Your website is one of the most important strategic assets available to your organisation. It’s your virtual shop window, enabling customers and potential customers to see who you are and what you offer, it’s an information hub - both internally and externally, it’s your 24-hour team player, able to perform key tasks whilst you sleep, it can speed up and drive efficiencies through your organisational process and much more.
In a nutshell, when optimised, a website can help your business to achieve its strategic goals.
However, ‘optimised’ is the key word. How many website owners can put their hand on their heart and say that they know that their website is working to its absolute best? To know this, regular audits need to take place and it can be difficult for organisations to view a site impartially. Site admins can get bogged down with the day to day running of a website or get into unintentional bad habits which make it difficult to work around problematic areas of the site. This is where a website audit undertaken by external experts can be a really useful exercise and form a vital part of your annual website maintenance plan.
What is a website audit and how can it help?
The purpose of a website audit is essentially to lend the eyes of an expert to identify improvements that can be made to a site. Quite often, an external pair of eyes can really help with spotting things that current site admins can't. Improvements made from the audit can help a website perform to the best of its ability and drive organisations towards their strategic goals.
Who is a website audit useful for?
Every organisation with a website, but it is most useful and we can even go as far to say, vital, for organisations with older websites. Particularly, websites that are over 3 years old!
What does a website audit include?
Typically, a website audit will look at all aspects of your current site and can include:
Design
An expert web designer will look at the overall design of the pages and elements, ensuring that they fit with your brand and flow together in the most compelling way. A design refresh or re-theme of certain areas may be recommended from the findings of the audit.
UX
The user experience for both the user and the site administrator will be examined during an audit to ensure that the navigation through the site is a positive experience, all links work as they should and that any information, along with the results of searches and actions are correct. Clunky navigation and difficult user experiences are frustrating and present the wrong image for your organisation. The audit will also analyse the editing experience in detail to ensure that administrators have a pain free editing experience. An audit will throw up issues that you may not be aware of.
Bugs
An audit will capture any technical or visual bugs that are occurring at any point of the site which can be a difficult thing for a site administrator to pinpoint.
Site speed and performance
One area which can often be overlooked but is analysed through an audit is the speed and general performance of a website. Using third party tools, slow loading, slow functionality and poor performance can be identified. If a website isn’t performing at its peak and is running slowly, it can be a frustrating experience for a user and can negatively affect the actions and processes that your website undertakes. Over time, this can affect your organisational objectives.
Bespoke functionality
If your website has bespoke functionality, a website audit can look at the performance of this to ensure that everything is running as it should.
Server security and performance
An audit can include the important aspect of server security. This will help identify and fix any vulnerabilities and prevent unauthorised access.
Content implementation
Through an audit, the expert can check through content and ensure that everything is flowing correctly, look at whether there is room for updates and improvements to enhance the UX and also check that all links are working correctly. SEO will also be checked and assessed to ensure that your site is operating to its maximum to help it appear in the results produced from search engines.
Who are we and how do we undertake website audits?
At Olamalu, we have a wide range of expertise within the team that can support the delivery of a website audit from designers covering the UX and the visual makeup of pages through to senior developers reviewing server security. We’re very experienced web developers and tech experts and during an audit our team review a website in detail, testing on numerous devices, browsers and screen sizes to ensure the findings are accurate. These findings are logged and divided into categories making it easy for the client to pick and choose which items to address first. One of the important services that we offer is reporting using analytical software to track how successful the changes are from the audit. These insights offer real long-term value for our clients in helping them to use data to map out long term strategic goals for their website. You don’t have to be an existing client of ours for us to undertake a website audit for you.
Why work with us?
Aside from being Drupal experts and experienced web developers, we’ve also won numerous awards for our brilliant apprenticeship scheme. We’re a friendly and down-to-earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who really care about the projects we work on and achieve brilliant outcomes.
We work with many of our clients as an ongoing technical partner, but we also offer a consultancy service to solve specific strategic challenges as well as website audits.
January 2025