When it comes to your website, it’s essential that you take the most suitable steps to ensure that everything is running at its best. To this end, you should know what a website audit is, how it works, and why this process is crucial for your site. Luckily, our team is on hand today to help with this – and so, without further ado, let’s take a look at what technical SEO audits are and how they could be the key to giving your site the ranking boost it needs to grow and perform at its best.
Don’t leave things to chance – find out more about the best strategies for technical SEO auditing to follow for your website redesign with help from our team today!
Why Is Website Audit Essential After Website Redesign?
So, you’ve just redesigned your website – but you’re not sure of the effect that this might have on your website’s rankings? This is something that’s definitely worth considering, as a website redesign – even if it doesn’t change any of the actual site content – could still alter your site’s position in the results (for better or worse).
Website audit is essential for the reliable long-term success of your website, as it provides a thorough and detailed examination and analysis of every page’s performance. Most commonly website audits are carried out for SEO purposes, but you may also need to undergo website auditing following a redesign as well to ensure that this hasn’t impacted your website’s accessibility for both users and search bots.
When carrying out the website audit, there are several factors to consider, including the navigation and accessibility of your website, mobile friendliness and website speed. Without considering these technical SEO factors, your website may not be fully optimised to achieve its goals and this could, in turn, make it harder for you to attract new traffic and keep visitors engaging with your site.
Ultimate Guide To Performing A Website Audit
So, you want to carry out a website audit for your site after a website redesign, but you’re not quite sure where to begin? If this is a position you find yourself in, then don’t panic; our friendly and experienced team can help. As part of this, we highly recommend that you use the SE Ranking Website Audit Tool to make website auditing a breeze and quickly spot major technical issues. This tool shows the main technical problems and recommendations on how to improve them. So, it’s definitely worth considering!
#1 Signing Up
To begin using the SE Ranking tool, you’ll need to create an account. Creating an account with SE Ranking is simple, fortunately. In the right upper corner you will see the blue betton“Free trial”; after you click on it, you’ll be redirected to the screen shown below. Then, simply fill in your details to get started with your new SE Ranking account, and once the process is completed, continue to sign in.
#2 Adding your Website
Next, head to your dashboard. If the website audit tab is not active, this is because you haven’t added your website. Fortunately, this is again a simple process, and you can do so by selecting the “Add a Website” button.
#3 Website Auditing with SE Ranking
After redesigning a website, its performance can change completely, for both good or bad. It is, however, your duty to ensure that you’re on the right side of things. This is where the SE Ranking site audit feature comes into the picture. This is a detailed website audit tool that allows you to check your website’s health and provides a detailed description of issues that websites can encounter and how to fix them. The website audit tool is split into sections:
- Overview,
- Issue report
- Pages crawled,
- Found resources,
- Found links,
- Crawl comparison,
- Page changes monitor.
Simply select your website from the dropdown list on the top left side of the screen (after registering with SE Ranking) and land to the website audit section and relax whilst the audit takes place. This can take some time, but once your audit has been completed, you’ll be taken to a dashboard.
The Overview section provides a dashboard showing the number of your website’ pages crawled, the amount of URLs found, the health score (which is developed to assess the overall health of your website). It is calculated based on the number of issues found during the audit itself and the impact that these can have. Critical or serious issues are given priority. Once you have finished redesigning, you must ensure that there are no critical errors on the website. On the Overview tab, you will also see a section called the Core Web Vitals, a set of quality metrics that are defined by Google and include factors such as the Largest Contentful Paint, the First Input Delay and the Cumulative Layout Shift - these all measure the website’s stability. Issues, domain metrics, page indexation, status codes and redirect response times are also included in the overview.
The issue report section provides a detailed explanation of all of the issues that can be encountered on your website and how to fix them. These can range from duplicate content to security to usability to website speed. You will even be notified if the audit picks up on a URL being too long. One of the major problems that occurs after the redesign is that of redirecting. Under the issue report section, ensure that all old site URLs perform 301 redirects to new site URLs, as you intended. This is the section where you can catch any stray 404s and implement additional redirects quickly.
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The next section of the website audit is an analysis of the crawled pages. This provides a detailed list of the crawled pages, which can be exported into a spreadsheet to view offline (a feature which is only available by subscription.) This report includes a list of referring pages, URL protocol, title, whether the pages can be followed by a search bot and other details. There are a total of 50 parameters available, one of which is the page loading time. We know that sometimes new designs might take a little longer to load because of the addition of new files, images, animations, or any sort of content. But we still have to ensure that the loading time of the pages is under a considerable limit. This will ensure that your redesigned website doesn’t force customers to leave.
The Found Resources section of the audit is similar to that of the crawled pages in its display, but highlights the source URL, status code, size and loading time. This information is particularly useful as it will show you how your website is responding to testing.
The Found Links section shows you the links that can be found within your website, and also shows the type of links that are included in your website. Depending on the content of your website, these can range from direct hyperlinks to images to CSS files ( a sheet which formats the content and HTML of your website.) Make sure to optimize the new images, CSS, and javascript files after the redesign. This can help improve the performance significantly.
The Crawl Comparison section provides you with the comparison of your current and previous audits. It shows your website health score (generally calculated out of 100) from both audits and the factors considered to calculate this score. This section also includes domain metrics, the Alexa rank and the information about website security.
The Page Changes Monitor allows you to track changes on your web pages. SE Ranking can monitor factors such as HTTP code, internal link, external links, content and keywords.
Conclusion
After redesigning your website, it can be a little difficult to determine whether your website is performing at its best – but luckily, there are a few ways you can check this. One such method you could consider checking whether your website is functioning effectively is to use the SE Ranking tool, a highly versatile SEO tool that the developers themselves define as the “all in one” solution for all things search engine optimization related.
As such, it’s always worth considering the benefits that tools such as these can offer – and fortunately, our team is on hand to help with this. Hopefully, our article today will have given you some further ideas and insights into this topic – because, after all, organic traffic is one of the most valuable forms of traffic there is for your website. So, optimize your website with the best SEO solutions; find out more by contacting our team today!
