Comprehensive WordPress Website Audit Checklist
Comprehensive WordPress Website Audit Checklist
Conducting a regular audit of your WordPress website is essential for maintaining its performance, security, and overall health. A thorough audit can help identify issues that may be affecting your site's usability, website speed, SEO, and security. In this guide, we'll walk you through the process of auditing your WordPress website and provide a comprehensive checklist to ensure you cover all critical areas.
Table of Contents
- Why Conduct a WordPress Website Audit?
- Auditing WordPress Performance
- WordPress Security Audits
- WordPress Technical SEO Audits
- User Experience (UX) and Accessibility Audit
- WordPress Content Audit
- WordPress Local SEO Audit
- Conducting a Regular WordPress Website Audit
Why Conduct a WordPress Website Audit?
Conducting a WordPress website audit is essential for several reasons, as it helps ensure the site’s optimal performance, security, and user experience. Specifically, when carrying out a WordPress audit, you can look into:
Finding and fixing performance issues
A WordPress website audit looks to ensure your WordPress website loads quickly and runs efficiently, enhancing user satisfaction and engagement. Being proactive by carrying out WordPress website audits prevents potential user drop-offs and maintains a positive first impression.
Testing & enhancing the security of your website
WordPress website audits also look to protect your website from vulnerabilities, hacking attempts, and data breaches. This type of WordPress website audit is a proactive security measures you can take to help avoid costly data loss, downtime, and damage to your reputation.
Improve user experience and accessibility
To make your website more user-friendly and accessible to a broader audience, including those with disabilities. Proactively improving accessibility ensures compliance with regulations and promotes inclusivity, broadening your reach.
Optimise for search engines (SEO)
Being proactive in SEO helps you stay ahead of algorithm changes and competition, maintaining a strong online presence to increase your website's visibility and ranking on search engine results pages, driving more organic traffic.
Ensure compliance with best practices and standards
Finally, WordPress website audits help you to meet industry standards, legal requirements, and provide a safe, reliable experience for your users. Proactive compliance helps avoid legal issues, fines, and ensures a trustworthy reputation.
Auditing WordPress Performance
Conducting a comprehensive performance audit of your WordPress website is crucial for ensuring optimal functionality, speed, and user experience. Utilising various tools allows you to thoroughly analyse your site's performance and identify key areas for enhancement. By following a structured approach to WordPress audits your website, including analysing page load speed, optimising images, minimising HTTP requests, leveraging browser caching, enabling file compression, and optimising your database, you can significantly improve your site's efficiency and provide a seamless experience for your visitors. So, without further ado, here's how to audit your WordPress website's performance:
Analyse Page Load Speed
Analysing your page load speed of your WordPress websites helps you to identify performance bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
You can use tools to carry out tests that will help you gather essential data about your website’s performance. To use the tools, simply navigate to one of the websites below and enter the URL of the page you want to test. It can be beneficial to run the tests multiple times at different times of the day to account for variability in traffic and server performance and record the results, focusing on key metrics such as load time, total page size, and the number of HTTP requests:
- Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool offers detailed performance reports and actionable suggestions for both mobile and desktop.
- GTmetrix: Provides insights into page load speed, detailed waterfall charts, and recommendations for improvement.
- Pingdom Website Speed Test: Allows you to test from different locations and offers a simple performance grade.
- Lighthouse (Chrome DevTools): Integrated into Chrome, it offers audits for performance, accessibility, SEO, and more.
Audit & Optimise Your Images
Auditing your images is a crucial step in optimising your WordPress website’s load speed and overall performance. Large, unoptimised images can significantly slow down your site, leading to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings.
Use Tools
To effectively audit your images, you can use a variety of tools that help you gather essential data about your website’s image performance. To audit your images, simply navigate to one of the websites below and enter the URL of the page you want to test. As with Page Load Speed it is beneficial to run the audits multiple times at different times of the day to account for variability in traffic and server performance, but this time you will want to focus on key metrics such as image size, format, compression level, and load time.
- Google PageSpeed Insights: Offers detailed reports on image optimisation and actionable suggestions for both mobile and desktop, highlighting images that need compression or format changes to enhance load speed.
- GTmetrix: Provides insights into image sizes, formats, and recommendations for improvement, including detailed waterfall charts that show how each image affects page load time.
- WebPageTest: This can be used for more advanced testing options, including different browsers and connection speeds, with image-specific data that is excellent for in-depth analysis and benchmarking.
- Lighthouse (Chrome DevTools): Integrated into Chrome, it offers audits for image optimisation, including suggestions for compressing and resizing images, and evaluates the use of modern image formats like WebP.
By utilising these image audit tools, you can identify which images are impacting your website’s performance and take targeted actions to optimise them. Regularly auditing and optimising your images not only improves load times and enhances user experience but also contributes to better SEO rankings and higher conversion rates. This proactive approach ensures that your WordPress site remains fast, efficient, and visually appealing, ultimately supporting the growth and success of your online presence.
optimise your images (Using tools)
The next step after auditing your images is to optimise your images! This is a crucial step in improving your WordPress website’s load speed and overall performance as large, unoptimised images can significantly slow down your site, leading to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings.
To effectively optimise your images, you can use a variety of tools that help compress and resize your images without compromising quality. To optimise your images, start by selecting one of the recommended tools below and upload the images you wish to optimise. You already know to un the audits multiple times at different times of the day to account for variability in traffic and server performance but this time, focus on key aspects such as image compression rate, file size reduction, and visual quality to ensure your images are both lightweight and visually appealing. Each tool offers unique features and capabilities that can provide a comprehensive approach to image optimisation:
- Smush: Automatically compresses and optimises your images as you upload them, reducing file sizes without losing quality.
- ShortPixel: Offers advanced image compression and supports modern formats like WebP, enhancing both speed and visual fidelity.
- Imagify: Provides three levels of compression, allowing you to balance image quality and file size based on your specific needs.
- TinyPNG: Specialises in compressing PNG and JPEG images, effectively reducing their file sizes while maintaining clarity.
Audit & Optimise Your WordPress Website Database
Auditing and optimising your WordPress database helps identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement, ensuring your website runs smoothly and efficiently. You can use specialised tools to carry out audits that will help you gather essential data about your database’s performance. To audit your database, simply navigate to one of the tools below and follow the instructions to connect to your WordPress database. The metrics that matter this time are database size, query performance, and the number of unnecessary entries.
- WP-Optimize: Automates database cleaning by removing post revisions, spam comments, and transient options, while also optimising database tables for improved performance.
- Advanced Database Cleaner: Identifies and deletes unused data, such as orphaned metadata and scheduled tasks, and provides detailed reports on database health.
- phpMyAdmin: A powerful web-based tool that allows you to manually inspect and optimise your database, including running SQL queries and repairing tables.
By utilising these database audit tools, you can identify which aspects of your database are impacting your website’s performance and take targeted actions to optimise them. Regularly auditing and optimising your WordPress database not only enhances load times and user experience but also contributes to better SEO rankings and overall website reliability. This proactive approach ensures that your WordPress site remains fast, efficient, and secure, supporting the long-term growth and success of your online presence.
WordPress Security Audits
Securing your WordPress site is vital to protect against hacking and data breaches. Utilising tools like Wordfence Security, Sucuri SiteCheck, and WPScan can help you fortify your site's defenses. By following key steps below, you can significantly enhance the security of your website and safeguard your valuable data.
How to audit your WordPress website's security
Here's how to audit your WordPress website's security:
- Check for updates to the WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins: Ensure everything is up-to-date to avoid security vulnerabilities.
- Check for Vulnerabilities: Use security plugins to scan for malware and vulnerabilities.
- Implement Strong Passwords: Use strong, unique passwords for all user accounts.
- Limit Login Attempts: Use plugins to limit the number of login attempts to prevent brute force attacks.
- Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Add an extra layer of security by enabling 2FA for user logins.
- Secure Your Hosting Environment: Ensure your hosting provider implements robust security measures.
WordPress Technical SEO Audits
Optimising your site for search engines helps improve visibility and traffic and tools to use are Yoast SEO or Rank Math, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider. With these WordPress technical SEO audit tools you can carry out the following checks to ensure your SEO is up to date:
Check On-Page SEO
Ensure all pages have unique, descriptive meta titles and descriptions. Use proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) for content structure.
Audit & Fix Broken Links
Auditing and fixing broken links is essential for maintaining a healthy WordPress website, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful tool to help you achieve this. To begin, download and install Screaming Frog SEO Spider on your computer. Once installed, open the application and enter your website’s URL into the search bar, then click 'Start' to initiate the crawl. Screaming Frog will scan all the pages of your site, identifying any broken links (such as 404 errors) along the way. After the crawl is complete, navigate to the 'Response Codes' tab and filter by 'Client Error (4xx)' to view a comprehensive list of broken links. Review each broken link to determine whether it needs to be updated with a correct URL, redirected to a relevant page, or removed entirely. To fix these broken links, log in to your WordPress dashboard, locate the affected pages or posts, and make the necessary adjustments. Additionally, you can export the list of broken links from Screaming Frog for easier management and tracking. Regularly using Screaming Frog to audit your site ensures that broken links are promptly addressed, enhancing your website’s user experience, improving SEO performance, and maintaining the overall integrity of your online presence.
Check for Duplicate Content
Ensuring that your WordPress website is free from duplicate content is essential for maintaining high search engine rankings and providing a unique user experience. Duplicate content can confuse search engines, leading to lower visibility and potential penalties. To effectively check for duplicate content, you can use a variety of tools that help you identify and resolve these issues. These tools are user-friendly but may require some understanding to interpret the results accurately. To check for duplicate content, simply navigate to the Siteliner website which analyses your entire website for duplicate content, broken links, and other SEO issues. It provides detailed reports highlighting pages with similar content, allowing you to make informed decisions about consolidating or rewriting duplicate sections to enhance your site’s performance.
User Experience (UX) and Accessibility Audit
Conducting a UX and Accessibility Audit on your WordPress website helps you create a more user-friendly, inclusive, and high-performing site that meets the needs of all visitors while also supporting your business goals. Tools to Use are: Google Lighthouse or WAVE Accessibility Tool and they can be used when carrying out the following checks:
- Improve Site Navigation: Ensure your site has a clear and intuitive navigation structure.
- Enhance Mobile Usability: Ensure your site is responsive and works well on all devices
- Check for Accessibility Issues: Use tools to identify and fix accessibility issues (e.g., alt text for images, ARIA labels).
- Check & Optimise Forms: Ensure forms are easy to use and submit.
- Check & Improve Readability: Use legible fonts, sufficient contrast, and proper spacing.
WordPress Content Audit
Carry our WordPress on-page SEO audits and regularly review your content ensures it remains relevant and valuable to your audience. Areas of a WordPress on-page SEO audit should ensure you look at:
Audit Content Freshness
Keeping your content up-to-date is vital for maintaining relevance and authority in your niche. Outdated content can misinform your audience and negatively impact your SEO rankings. Here’s how to effectively update your outdated content:
Step 1: Spot What’s Past Its Sell-By Date
To figure out which of your posts are starting to show their age, head over to Google Analytics and have a look at the posts that aren’t getting the traffic they used to or ones where people are bouncing off quickly. That’s a big clue that something’s off. Luckily, as you’re using WordPress, grab a plugin like Yoast SEO or Content Audit to make life easier. These tools will highlight older posts that need a bit of a refresh.
Step 2: Give It a Good Look Over
Once you’ve found what needs updating, it’s time to dive in and check it over properly. Start by reading through the posts to spot any outdated information, broken links, or stats that are no longer accurate. Then, get some fresh research. Go online and find the latest trends, data, and insights so you can be sure everything’s up-to-date.
Step 3: Spruce It All Up
Now, it’s time to do the fun bit—giving the content a bit of a makeover. Add the new information you’ve gathered, whether it’s updated statistics, fresh insights, or any new developments in the topic. While you’re at it, improve how it reads. Break up long paragraphs, add subheadings where necessary, and make sure it’s easy to scan with bullet points. This’ll make your post much more reader-friendly. Don’t forget to update the SEO too—make sure the keywords, meta descriptions, and alt texts are all current.
Step 4: Show It Off Properly
Once your post is all shiny and new, you’ve got to let people know. Republish the post and make sure you’ve updated the date so both your readers and Google know it’s been refreshed. Then, get it out there! Share the updated content on your social media, send it out through your email newsletters, and promote it wherever you can to drive traffic back to it.
Delete or Improve Low-Quality Pages and Posts
Thin content refers to pages or posts with little to no value to visitors, such as short articles, duplicate content, or pages with minimal information. Removing or enhancing thin content can significantly improve your site’s quality and SEO performance.
Step 1: Spot the Thin Content
First off, you’ll want to track down the pages on your site that aren’t pulling their weight. Jump into Google Search Console and check out the Performance report. It’ll show you which pages have low impressions and clicks—these are usually the ones that aren't providing much value. You can also use tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or SEMrush to scan your site. These will help you find pages with short word counts or those that have high bounce rates, which often means they’re not engaging enough.
Step 2: Evaluate Content Quality
Once you’ve found the thin content, it’s time to see if it’s still worth keeping. Start by checking if the content’s still relevant to your audience and whether it aligns with your current business goals. You also need to keep an eye out for duplicate content, as that can confuse search engines and mess with your SEO. If you've got a few pages saying the same thing, that’s something you’ll want to clean up.
Step 3: Decide Whether to Delete or Improve
Now you’ve got to make a choice: do you delete it or improve it? If the content’s completely irrelevant, outdated, or just not offering anything useful, it’s probably time to get rid of it. If you do, make sure to set up a 301 redirect to send people to a more valuable page on your site. But, if the content’s got potential, you can spruce it up. Add more details, update any facts, and make it more readable so it stands a better chance of performing well.
Step 4: Put the Plan into Action
After deciding what to do, it’s time to take action. Either update the content with fresh, useful information or remove it from your site altogether. If you’re deleting, don’t forget to set up proper redirects so visitors don’t end up lost, and so your SEO doesn’t take a hit.
WordPress local SEO audit
A WordPress website local SEO audit that only looks at the website (onsite) is a comprehensive assessment of your site's technical elements and content to ensure it is optimised for local search visibility. This type of WordPress website audit focuses on factors that can directly impact your site's ranking in local search results, such as:
- NAP Consistency: This means carrying out a WordPress website audit that looks to ensuring your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) information is consistent across your website, Google My Business listing, and other online directories.
- Schema Markup: Implementing schema markup to provide search engines with structured data about your business, helping them understand your location and services.
- Keyword Optimisation: Incorporating relevant local keywords throughout your website content, including titles, meta descriptions, headings, and body text.
- Geo-Targeting: Using location-specific keywords and content to target your local audience.
- Local Content: Creating content that is relevant to your local community, such as local events, news, or information.
Conducting a regular WordPress website audits
Conducting a regular WordPress website audit is essential for maintaining a healthy, secure, and high-performing site.
By following the steps and checklist provided in this guide, you can systematically review and improve various aspects of your site, ensuring it delivers the best possible experience for your visitors and performs well in search engines. Regular WordPress audits not only help in identifying and fixing issues but also in keeping your site up-to-date with the latest WordPress best practices and standards.
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