What we find in a typical website audit

Here at GO Creative, we offer free website audits. The benefit of a free audit is that we find all the problems that may be impacting on your business.

It’s really important to know what those issues are, before we can work towards improving the website and your online presence. Then, once those issues are resolved, any marketing investment will be much more cost effective.

We can also offer monthly website management services to proactively improve the website, and stay on top of any issues that may arise.

What do we look at in a free website audit?

• Configuration: We look for coding errors and broken links, as well as how your hosting and emails have been setup.
• Performance: We look at anything that affects your website’s overall performance, such as the size of the images and files, your hosting package and the configuration of any software.
• Mobile: Does your website adapt automatically for mobile phones and tablets? Is there information missing from the pages, does the menu work correctly and is it easy to use?
• Search: Here we look at the amount and quality of the content on your website, as well as its linking structure and business listings.
• Design: How good does your website look to visitors? Do you have a high quality logo or does it look rather amateurish? Do you have lots of social media links and what are your unique selling points? In other words, what makes your business different from your competition and does that come across well on your website?
• Sales: We look at the quality and user-friendliness of your forms, any tap-to-call buttons for calling your customer service department, how your website tracks enquiries and whether you are missing out on any opportunities to increase conversions.
• Maintenance: Website maintenance is vital for the growth of your online business, so we check to see if all of your software is up to date, we look at your management plans and your website’s security.

As web developers, we build websites from scratch so we know what can go wrong, which is why our website maintenance packages are so popular in Brisbane. If we can build them – we can fix them!

Now you know what we look for when we perform a free audit on your website, let’s take a look at some of the most common problems we actually find during an audit.

What are the problems we commonly find in website audits?

When we perform a free audit for our clients we usually find a whole range of problems, mainly because they often aren’t built to a high standard. Sometimes we can fix these problems, but other times there are just so many issues with a website that we recommend a completely new build and redevelopment of their site.

We also find websites that haven’t been updated in years, usually because the business owners have no-one to help them manage their sites or perform website maintenance, so it’s just been left to linger in no-man’s-land really.

Coding errors: These are one of the biggest problems with many older websites, some of which we can fix, but others that really need to be totally redeveloped due to a host of problems with the code, which can affect all parts of a website.

Poor loading speeds: These are usually due incorrect compression of the image files or uploading large image files that are then compressed on the website. These huge files slow down your website to the point where its page loading speed is often termed ‘glacial’.

Mobile issues: When accessing a website on your phone, you should be able to tap the phone number to call the website, but many websites don’t have this functionality. Also, menus don’t often function correctly on mobile phones, and different elements on the page can overlap or be cut off and simply don’t render correctly.

Sales & conversions: Many websites can actually look really good, but they don’t do a great job of converting visitors to the site. Often we see poor quality content, a lack of CTAs, no SEO and broken links, all of which can devastate your conversions and assign your website to the backwaters of the internet.

Site security & updates: We often find a host of places where hackers can easily enter your website and aren’t being protected, particularly via old software that has not been updated due to a lack of website maintenance. We can quickly implement measures to make your website secure against hacking and we include software updating as one of the features of our website maintenance packages in Brisbane.

No backups: Another problem that we quite often come across is that business owners don’t backup their websites, so if it’s hacked or corrupted in some way, they have no fall-back options. In this case, their website simply goes offline and needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch. We make sure that your website is fully backed up on a regular basis so that if anything does happen, we can have you up and running again in no time at all.

If you’re interested in website maintenance for your website or even a free audit, don’t hesitate to give us a call.