Is your website slow and a bit outdated? In a few minutes, you can easily check if your website is running optimally so that you don't lose potential customers. Here are three ways to audit your own site's performance, SEO, and user experience.
1. Evaluate Site Speed
A slow website is a low ranking website. Google ranks your (slow loading) website lower in the search engine results page (SERP) because they would rather show your competitor's fast loading website instead.
Check your site's speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Website Grader. Google PageSpeed Insights helps identify performance issues, such as large image files, or unoptimized code that are slowing down your loading speed.
2. Check Your SEO Basics
Do you have specific titles, descriptive descriptions, and relevant headers for your website pages? Well, if you don't, that would be your first step.
These on-page SEO elements help Google understand and rank your pages better. Use a free tool like Meta Tags Toolkit. They even show you how your website looks like throughout all of the social media outlets, so check it out!
3. Assess User experience
Put yourself in the shoes of your website viewer and think: is this site easy to navigate? Is the text large enough for me to read? Does the background image blend well with the text on top of it?
Then, make sure all of your links in your pages lead to a page and not a 404 Not Found page, forms are simple to fill out, and the overall experience should feel like a walk in the park and not like a crowded mess.
Action Steps
- Run Speed Tests: Use tools like PageSpeed Insights and implement their recommended actions.
- SEO Sweep: Update (on every page) your meta tags, descriptions, keywords, and fix any broken links.
- User Journey: Ask a friend or a family member to quickly browse your site to get initial impressions.