Website Assessment – A Comprehensive Guide

Your website does not start producing results as soon as you launch it. This is why continuous website assessment and optimization is necessary. 

Getting results from your website requires constant care, attention, and optimization. 

This is a comprehensive guide on website assessment and optimization. We’ll go over the following in this post:

• Website assessment and its importance
• Website assessment checklist 
• Best website assessment tools 
• Website assessment services 
• Lots more 

So let’s dig in and improve your website!

Importance of website assessment

Website assessment helps to determine the problems or improvements needed on your website and allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your website in achieving its intended goals These factors are very important for a website’s performance and SEO. 

There are multiple tools you can use for website assessment. Implementing these suggestions can help your website in multiple ways including:

• Search engine rankings 
• Attracting and retaining users
• Website speed 
• Website performance 
• Expanding your reach (Devices etc)
• Keeping it user friendly
• Keeping the website up to date 
• Generating leads and sales

By identifying strengths and weaknesses, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your website’s performance, enhance user engagement, and achieve your business objectives and website goals. 

Additionally, website assessments can help identify potential security vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

Website assessment checklist

Website assessment involves all the aspects of your website including:

1. Website speed 

Website speed is one of the most important factors Google consider while ranking a website. It is important that your website is optimized for speed for devices as well as desktop. 

This is not only important for SEO but also user experience and retention. If your website takes too long to load, you may lose your potential customers to your competitors. 

There are multiple tools that can be used to check the website’s speed, we’ll explore them in detail below. 

However, your website should always be in the green zone at least. 

Here are some key points to consider to optimize your website for speed:

• File minification 
• Website security should be great
• Always optimize and compress media 
• Keep the page cache enabled 
• Avoid hosting videos on the website
• Keep the website up to date (Theme, plugins)
• High quality website hosting platform
• Use plugin for speed optimization

Website speed optimization is crucial for your online success. 

2. Website performance

After speed optimization, you need to also look out for your website’s performance and make sure it’s always in the green zone. 

As mentioned above, there are multiple tools for this as well. 

Website Performance according to Google and our own experience consists of four things. 

• Accessibility 
• Speed
• Security
• SEO

We have already covered speed, but is important to make sure that your website up to the mark with Accessibility, security and SEO as well. 

For website accessibility, you need to make sure that your website is ADA compliant as it has become a law in most countries. 

3. Website security 

Website hacking has become very normal these days, especially if your website is on WordPress, it is at a higher risk, since it is the most popular CMS. 

And again, it is also crucial to rank on search engines, sites that are not secure can have a negative impact on your website’s SEO

You can focus on the following points to make sure your website’s security is never compromised. 

• Keep the core website software updated
• Plugins and themes should aways be up to date
• Avoid using common user names and passwords
• Remove themes and plugins that are not in use
• Ensure SSL certificate is installed and activated
• Limit login attempts
• Use two-factor authentication
• Use security plugins 

Website security is not only important for SEO and users, but for your business as well. You invest your time, money, and resources to build a website. If it’s not secure, you might end up losing all of it. 

4. Google Indexing

It is important to keep a regular check on your website pages that Google is indexing. 

You don’t want low quality and poor content pages to be indexed by search engines. 

It is ideal to keep the following pages no-indexed: 

• Thin content pages
• Archives pages
• 404 pages
• Old content posts/pages (News, press release etc)
• Low quality pages 

As important it is to keep such pages no-index, it is equally important to ensure that your quality pages are being indexed by Google. You can use Google Search Console for this purpose. 

5. Mobile optimization  

Do you know over 52% of web traffic comes in from mobile users?

That’s reason enough why mobile conversion optimization can not be ignored.

A site can look great on desktop but an absolute mess on devices if they are not optimized properly. 

Here’s how you can keep your website mobile optimized:

• Keep the mobile design simple
• Work on mobile speed optimization
• Enable browser caching 
• Use mobile friendly pop-ups
• Keep the structure mobile friendly
• Eliminate unnecessary distractions

You can also check mobile performance through various optimization tools and work on the insights they provide. 

Website assessment tools 

Website assessment tools are software programs designed to evaluate and analyze various aspects of a website. These tools can help website owners and developers identify issues and areas for improvement, as well as monitor website performance and security.

Website assessment tools can also be classified as the following: 

1. Website performance and speed testers

These tools analyze website speed, load times, and other performance metrics to identify areas for optimization. Examples include Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom.

2. Accessibility checkers

These tools evaluate a website’s accessibility and compliance with web accessibility standards. Examples include Wave and AChecker.

3. Search engine optimization (SEO) analyzers

These tools evaluate a website’s content and structure to identify opportunities for optimizing search engine rankings. There are hundreds of tools out there for this purpose. Examples include SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.

4. Security scanners

These tools analyze a website’s security vulnerabilities, including malware infections, outdated software, and other potential security risks. Examples include Sucuri, Qualys, and Nessus.

5. Content analysis tools

These tools evaluate the quality and relevance of a website’s content, including readability, keyword density, and other metrics. Examples include Yoast SEO, Hemingway, and Grammarly.

These tools can be used individually or in combination to provide a comprehensive assessment of a website’s overall performance, security, accessibility, and SEO.

Google PageSpeed Insights

This is a speed and performance tool by Google. It is quick and easy to use. Also, it shows your site’s speed and performance on both desktops and devices. It rates your performance between 1-100 and also give recommendations to improve it. 

GT Metrix

It is one of the most popular tool used by professionals. It crawls the entire website and gives a detailed report along with suggestions and improvements recommendation. 

 Ahrefs

It is an SEO tool designed to help you in getting higher search engine ranking through various ways including keyword research, site audits, and link building as well domain ranking and so on. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a tool by Neil Patel, it helps to generate new keyword ideas and optimize search engine rankings. Using the tool, you can improve your content marketing strategy for your website as it gives various metrics like rankings, SEO score, etc. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console measures your site’s traffic and performance. This tool crawls your entire website and also gives a detailed report with suggestions to improve it’s performance. 

It provides metrics like page views, SEO score, ranking keywords, geolocations, and how visitors interact with your website. 

Website auditing service

Website audit services review your website manually and share a detailed report with actionable steps that you can implement to improve your website on your own. 

It includes all the missing elements on your website to improve the conversion rate as well as design and content issues. 

Also, it provides a detailed SEO report that includes the following:

• Current rankings 
• Domain authority 
• Keyword suggestions
• Website performance report
• Technical audit 
• Traffic overview 
• And so on 

Conclusion

Conducting regular website assessment is essential to improve your website performance and increase leads for your business. By doing regular website audits and reviews, you can identify issues and fix them on time. 

However, if you need help with your website audit or assessment, feel free to shoot us an email using this form.