Because your website isn’t a physical entity, it can be easy to forget that it still needs regular maintenance and updates. Just like your car, computer, and other hardware, you have to check up on your site to ensure that it’s still performing optimally.

Be mindful of early signs of technical issues and address them immediately. Don’t wait until they’ve done enough damage to your domain and reputation. Conduct regular website audits to keep everything in tip-top shape.

What is a Website Audit?

A website audit is a process where you evaluate the performance of your site in terms of search engine-friendliness. It encompasses several areas, such as search engine optimization (SEO), security, conversion rate, and overall health.

In this type of audit, you have to analyze all the elements in your domain to make sure that they’re working properly. You might not need to conduct a full site scan all the time, but it’s recommended that you schedule it regularly. Meanwhile, you can check the different areas of your website in intervals.

Reasons to Conduct a Website Audit Regularly

You may be thinking that it’d be a waste of resources to have regular site audits as you’ll just ensure that you build a solid foundation for your website. This includes optimizing it for search engine visibility right at the start and maintaining strict publishing standards.

However, it can’t be helped that some technical issues might come up. Here’s why website audits are important:

1. Improve User Experience

Every business needs to invest in the user experience (UX) of its site. You don’t want to put off web visitors with broken links and slow-loading pages. When you neglect to solve this problem, it’s like you’re directing them to check out your competitors instead.

A site audit can help you determine bad links and other broken elements. If you have an e-commerce site, you should ensure that you provide a seamless checkout page that encourages people to complete the transaction. Make sure that your privacy policy is also present on every page to avoid legal entanglements.

These things detract users from enjoying their content. These issues can cause people to abandon your domain and increase your bounce rate.

2. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Another reason you should do full website scans regularly is to keep your domain optimized for search engines. Google and Bing update their algorithms regularly to accommodate the changes in web users’ needs and preferences. 

Knowing this, you should also endeavor to stay abreast of the changes in these platforms so that you can retain and boost your visibility to your target audience. Check your site’s content, meta descriptions, URL structures, crawlability, and mobile-friendliness for optimization.

Your website often changes, too, with the addition of new content, updates on old pages, dev team upgrades, and server configurations. With this, the original optimizations that you performed must’ve been altered as well.

At the same time, doing an audit can help you avoid being penalized by search engines for unwittingly performing manipulative ranking methods. The process allows you to identify and fix anything that can lead to penalization. 

3. Enhance Security

Security is a key aspect to monitor for your site audit. Users wouldn’t want to browse a website, let alone share their payment information that isn’t protected or encrypted. 

You may already have a security protocol or HTTPS for most or all of your pages, but you should make sure that this feature is explicitly present when you collect consumer data. A website audit will help you determine any potential issues that may arise from the information collection process and mitigate those risks.

4. Boost Conversions

Additionally, scanning your site should let you know which portions are effective in converting web visitors to paying customers. This type of insight is valuable for improving the other areas of your domain to boost conversions.

5. Identify New SEO Opportunities

You can also gain awareness of fresh SEO opportunities when you scan your website regularly. The process can make you aware of areas that you missed optimizing before. These can be underperforming pages that only need an update, assets that shouldn’t be included in the index, or technical modifications to boost overall UX.

Conclusion

A website audit is crucial to the success of your digital marketing campaign. You need to perform this inspection regularly to ensure that all the elements of your site are optimized and increasing conversions through improving UX and enhancing security. The process can also help you discover new SEO opportunities.