How to Do a Website Audit Mindfully

Written by
Yevheniia Khromova
Dec 23, 2022
26 min read

Running a technical website audit takes more effort than you might think. It’s like a 1000-piece Lego set that’s difficult to assemble without detailed instructions, which is why we prepared this ultimate guide to website auditing for you.

We’ll look at what a site audit is and how often it should be performed. You’ll also learn how to analyze a website, check it for various errors using SE Ranking’s Website Audit, evaluate the results and prioritize fixes, and even write technical assignments for the development team. You’ll also receive a website technical audit checklist to help you evaluate your website.

So, without further ado, let’s dive right in! 

What is a site audit?

A site audit is a comprehensive and detailed website analysis. It identifies errors and problems (technical, content, UX, conversion, etc.) that can be resolved to improve your website performance, its ranking in search results, and, thus, business efficiency and revenue.

Types of website audits

There are different audits:

  • Website SEO audit involves examining a website for its search engine optimization. This includes evaluating the usage of keywords, meta tags, URLs, backlinks, content quality, site structure, and other factors.
  • Content audit focuses on the quality and effectiveness of a website’s content. It looks at relevancy, readability, length, use of visuals, consistency, and how well the content meets the needs of the audience.
  • UX/UI audit examines the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of a website. It assesses such aspects of SEO and UX as the website design, navigation, accessibility, usability, and overall experience of the website from a user’s perspective.
  • Conversion optimization audit analyzes how well the website converts visitors into customers. It reviews elements like call-to-actions, landing pages, sales funnels, and overall website design that influences a user’s conversions.
  • Etc.

A technical website audit is another type of audit. It identifies technical SEO issues and can also be referred to as a site audit. Both terms are interchangeable, but the former is more specific and is the kind of check we’ll focus on in this article. 

The issues that can be detected during a technical site audit include:

  • Indexation problems
  • Errors in the code
  • Incorrect work of redirects
  • Broken links and website files
  • Slow loading speed and poor Core Web Vitals
  • Incorrect server responses
  • Duplicate content and pages
  • Misconfiguration of the sitemap and robots.txt, etc.

All these mistakes lower your website performance, send bad signals to search engines, and can decrease your position in search results.

Why is regular site analysis critical?

If a website is a car, then a site analysis is the technical inspection done on it. It is mandatory to carry out this ‘inspection’ on a regular basis. This way, you can identify technical breakdowns and malfunctions that prevent your ‘car’ from performing its primary function effectively as well as save money on expensive repairs. 

Why do a website audit? Because it helps site owners: 

  • Understand how healthy their resource is.
  • Identify errors that prevent it from functioning correctly.
  • Make a list of pages and issues that need to be revised and fixed.
  • Reveal potential technical problems that can affect the site’s functioning.

The frequency of this technical SEO audit depends on several factors:

  • How well it performs

If you check your website traffic and notice that it has decreased significantly (or that it doesn’t increase, no matter what you do), it’s high time to run a comprehensive audit of the technical component of your website. This also holds true if the percentage of your conversions has dropped (or visitors don’t convert at all). Maybe your clients can’t see your pages because they aren’t indexed, or they can’t land on them due to broken links. There could be numerous reasons for this, and a technical audit allows you to identify and fix them.

  • How big your website is

Sites with thousands of pages can often have errors like duplicate content, misconfigured redirects, unclear structure, and confusing navigation. Voluminous sites with loads of content should be audited more often because the errors above can lead to deteriorated UX and, ultimately, lower rankings in search engines.

  • How often your website gets updated

By “updates,” we mean any changes to your site, from design and address changes to the appearance of new content and pages. You should ideally check websites after each update.

How to do a website audit

Manually conducting comprehensive website audits is a lengthy and resource-intensive process. It’s easier to use specialized site scanners, such as Website Audit from SE Ranking, in conjunction with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

This site audit tool provides the most comprehensive and accurate check because it scans the entire site, identifies dozens of technical errors, and provides recommendations on how to fix them. Moreover, you can manage and customize your technical SEO audit using flexible settings.

Alternatively, you can choose your best SEO audit tool from this carefully selected list of top solutions designed to cover various specific needs.

Steps to setting up an automated audit in SE Ranking

SE Ranking’s website SEO auditing tools has a variety of settings to make the technical website audit process convenient and effective. Below, we’ve laid out everything you need to know about setting up an automated audit with the settings that work best for you.

To open settings, go to the Website Audit and click on the gear icon at the top right of the screen.

Audit settings

Follow the steps below to configure an automated technical SEO website audit.

Scanning schedule 

You can start the audit manually whenever you want by selecting the Manually option, or you can set the frequency with which it will be performed automatically (weekly or monthly, specifying the day and time that suits you).

You can also add your email to get notified once your technical SEO audit is finished.

Audit schedule options

Pages to scan 

You can scan all pages of your website starting from the homepage. The scanner will follow every internal link but won’t include subdomains. If you want to check subdomains and their pages, enable the Subdomains slider. 

Another option is to scan every page specified in the XML sitemap. You can also add the list of pages that you want the tool to audit. Make sure it’s in a TXT or CSV format.

Scanning rules 

Enable or disable the toggle next to each rule to give the SE Ranking bot scanning instructions. Depending on your choice, the SE Ranking bot will scan the website following instructions in the robots.txt file or ignore them. 

The same applies to Ignore Noindex and Ignore Nofollow. If enabled, the bot will ignore the noindex and nofollow directives.

Audit scanning rules

If you want the SE Ranking bot to crawl or ignore certain website sections or pages, enter them into the Website directories field under the Additional rules section. Click on Add rule, enter the directory and choose one of the following rules: 

  • Permit (to enable crawling the pages from a specified directory)
  • Prohibit (to disable crawling the pages from a specified directory)
  • Hide (to exclude from the report the pages from a specified directory)

You can also specify URL parameters that should be ignored while scanning. Select Ignore all parameters to exclude all values or choose Ignore custom parameters to manually set which ones to ignore. 

Parser settings

Because some websites may prevent specific crawlers from crawling their pages, the audit may be incomplete or inaccurate. If your site has this feature, you can manually choose a bot for crawling. SE Ranking’s bot is selected by default, but you’ll have a list of 13 other bots to choose from. Just select a User Agent name, and our system will use it to crawl your website.

Audit parser settings

The Cloudflare Firewall can sometimes block SE Ranking’s bot. If this is the case, it will be unable to crawl the website, but you can remove restrictions by whitelisting IPs. Here’s what you should do:

  • Go to your Cloudflare dashboard.
  • Choose your account and domain.
  • Go to the Security section and click WAF. 
  • Select the Tools subsection. 
  • Enter one of SE Ranking’s IPs under IP Access Rules.

94.130.21.184

116.202.175.208

162.55.90.109

162.55.94.176

195.201.82.119

168.119.139.232

148.251.139.87

  • Select an Allow action. 
  • Choose the Current website only or All websites in the account in the Zone section to specify where the rule should apply. 
  • Hit the Add button.

Some pages can also be restricted for the crawler you choose. Enter the login and password for the SE Ranking bot in the appropriate fields to give it access to specific pages.

Audit autorization on restricted pages

Crawling limits and restrictions 

Under this section, you can manage the following parameters:

  • The number of pages to scan. Specify the number of pages the bot should crawl. Consider your subscription limits and your needs.
  • Scanning depth. Decide how deep you want the bot to go.
  • The number of server requests. Decide on the number of requests that suits you, depending on the server’s capabilities. But remember that too many can overload the server, while too few can affect the crawl speed of your website. 
  • The number of redirects. Indicate the number of redirects for a crawler to scan during the audit.
Audit limits and restrictions

Report setup

When analyzing and evaluating the website, the SE Ranking bot focuses on what search engines recommend and considers common best practices. The basic parameters, however, aren’t always one-size-fits-all. You can customize settings in this section, and the bot will take new values into account when scanning the site and generating a report.

You can set up:

  • Meta tag title length
  • Meta tag description length 
  • Maximum page size
  • The minimum number of words on the page
  • H1 header maximum length
  • H2 header maximum length

Issues to monitor

In this section, you can specify which issues to track on your website during the audit. They are grouped into 19 categories, including JavaScript, HTTP status code, crawling-related issues, duplicate content, mobile optimization, usability, etc. 

All issues, by order of importance, are grouped into errors, warnings, and notices. Errors are the most critical issues to fix, while notices are just cautionary information. Each error comes with a description and suggestions on how to fix it.  

You can enable or disable the whole category as well as individual issues within it. If disabled, the SE Ranking bot won’t detect said issues during the scan. It also won’t include them in the report, and won’t consider them when calculating your website’s health score.

When you’ve finished customizing all of the settings, hit the Apply Changes button to save your changes. You can immediately run an audit with the new parameters. The crawl may take several minutes depending on your site’s size.

Apply audit settings
RUN A WEBSITE AUDIT
Score your website in 2 minutes.

Enter any website URL to get a detailed report on tech issues and suggested solutions.

Audit results review

When the in-depth scanning is completed, the findings will be available in the Website Audit module. You can also open it through the left-hand vertical navigation bar.

Website audit tab

Depending on the purpose of your technical audit, you can use the Website Audit tool’s various tabs. For example:

  • If you want to get a general picture of your website’s technical health and performance, go to the Overview tab.
  • If you’re interested in specific technical and other errors detected on your website, open the Issue Report tab.
  • If you want to analyze website pages by specific parameters or have high-priority pages that you want to focus on first, use the Crawled Pages tab.
  • If you need to track down errors in images, files, or code, go to the Found Resources tab..
  • If you want to check if your website has internal or external linking problems, open the Found Links tab.
  • If you want to compare the results of multiple audits and find the date an issue occurred, check out the Crawl Comparison tab.

Now, let’s take a closer look at each task and report.

Getting the bigger picture

Select the Overview report from the Website Audit module to get all of your site’s key information in convenient and easy-to-understand graphs, charts, and tables. This tab will help you gauge the technical situation of your website.

The Health Score of your website is one of the most important features of this report. It is calculated based on the number and severity of issues found during the audit. This means that a site with a high number of low-severity errors will have a higher health score than one with fewer high-severity errors. It makes SE Ranking’s health score more accurate.

Website health score

In this section, you’ll also see the:

  • Number of pages scanned and URLs found.
  • Core Web Vitals gradation and top five issues found.
  • Distribution of scanned pages by issue categories.
  • HTTP status codes and server response time.
  • Number of redirects and detached pages.
  • Link attributes, meta robots tags, and more.

Analyzing issues found

If you want to know what’s wrong with your sitemap, hreflang tags, redirects, usability, indexing, security, etc., you should go to the Issue Report. Having all the issues structured on one dashboard will help you better assess the time and effort needed.

Website audit examines the site using 130 parameters and categorizes errors into 19 categories. Each category and issue includes a list of affected pages and a description to help you understand why fixing is essential, as well as the problem location to help you quickly detect affected pages. Fix tips are also available.

Issue report overview

Each issue also has a special mark to indicate its severity. This is especially important when it comes to prioritizing fixes (as we’ll discuss later in this article). 

  • A green check mark means that the parameter is error-free.
  • A blue exclamation mark is called a Notice. It indicates that the issue may not be a problem but should be investigated (links are missing anchors, H1 tags are too short, etc.).
  • A yellow triangle with an exclamation mark is called a Warning. It denotes medium-severity errors that are not that critical but should be addressed (description is missing or it’s too long, XML sitemap issues, JavaScript isn’t compressed, etc.).
  • A red cross is called an Error. It highlights the most critical issues that are likely to harm your SEO and result in a negative user experience (HTTP status code issues, duplicate pages, redirect chains, etc.).

Errors, Warnings, and Notices can also be used as issue filters. You can view all problems or choose the group in which you are now more interested.

Audit filters for issues

Focusing on pages

Open the Crawled Pages tab if you want to analyze specific pages or find pages with specific errors. This section shows every page that the bot has found on your website during the audit. You can view all pages at once or sort them by the above-mentioned Errors, Warnings, and Notices.

For each URL, you’ll get: 

  • The number of referring pages.
  • The number of issues detected.
  • The number of characters in the URL.
  • The type and version of the web protocol.
  • Sitemap inclusion data.
  • Server response code on the page.
  • Blocking by robots.txt data. 
  • And many other parameters.

You can also expand your report and add columns with other errors by using the Columns option.

Columns in Crawled Pages tab

By clicking on the number of errors, you’ll see a list of page SEO issues, along with more info. Each issue has a prioritization mark and comes with a description and fix tips.

Crawled pages issues

To find pages with specific problems, use filters. 

Let’s say you want to detect soft 404 pages. This error occurs when the page doesn’t exist, but sometimes the server will return a 200 OK response code. This can happen if there’s no content or very little of it on the page. 

To find these pages, navigate to the Crawled Pages section filters and choose the following parameters: Status Code>and Issues>Textual Content>Low word count>or Issues>Crawling>Frame is used. Click the Apply Filters button to get all potential soft 404 pages in one second.

Filters to find soft 404 pages

You should also check to see if private pages are blocked by robots.txt or noindex. 

Private pages contain a user’s sensitive information, like a login page. These pages should be excluded from indexing, but sometimes they aren’t. 

To find them, go to the Crawled Pages section and apply the following filters: URL>login>or URL>profile>and robots meta tag>noindex

Filters for private pages

These are just a few examples. Pages can be filtered by various categories and errors. This allows you to focus first on solving critical issues on the pages that matter most.

Analyzing web pages separately allows you to identify and fix even minor issues. You can also use URL patterns to quickly analyze a page’s indexing status, link ratio, and page meta tags.

Checking website resources

The effectiveness of your website depends on how well you work with its image and code files. For example, your site’s page loading speed and Core Web Vitals can be negatively impacted if it has too many large images. Check the Found resources section under the Website Audit tool to identify these issues.

This tab contains details on all images, CSS and JavaScript resources located on your site. You can use them as sorting categories to make your analysis easier.

Found resources

For each resource found, you’ll get:

  • The number of pages on which it’s located.
  • It’s type (image, CSS, JS).
  • The server response code on the page.
  • It’s size.
  • It’s loading time.

You can also use these categories as filters to customize your audit and find resources that are causing malfunctions on your site.

Click on the Source URL to view the list of all URLs that contain the found resource. Each link will come with status information (dofollow/nofollow), the image’s alternative text (if there’s any), title, and its uniqueness.

One of the most common resource-related errors is having images that are too big. Our recent research shows that 83.87% of websites suffer from this, so we advise you to use filters to see if you belong to this surprisingly large group.

To list images that are too large on your site, go to the Found Resources section and select the Images in the sorting panel. Then, press Add Filter and choose Size. The optimal image size is less than 2MB, so enter 2048 as a starting point and hit the Apply Filters button.

Filters for resources

Link research 

Links are critical for optimizing your website. Internal links help users and search engines navigate your website, while external links allow your users to get more information. It’s likely that the main issue here is broken links, which also happens to be the most common.  

The Found links section shows every internal and external link to your website, along with their:

  • Status code
  • Link type (image, CSS, JS, hyperlink, canonical, hreflang, meta refresh)
  • Source URL
  • Anchor text
  • Anchor type (text or image)
  • Alt attribute
  • Status data (dofollow/nofollow)

This section also has a filtering option to help you with your audit. 

Let’s say you want to detect broken internal links on your site. Just open filters in the Internal Links tab, choose status code 404, and click Apply Filter. You’ll immediately see a list of broken links, as well as the pages from which they are linked, along with additional data.

Filters for found links

Comparing audit results

If you’ve performed several checks, you can compare website audit reports. This will help you understand the effectiveness of your fixes since the previous check and identify when new errors occurred.

Go to the Crawl Comparison and choose two dates. You’ll see how the health score has changed, which metrics improved or got worse, and how the number of fixes and new errors correlate.

Crawl comparison

Technical website audit pro tips

With years of SEO experience, we’ve discovered five secrets that can help your technical audit be even more effective. We’re excited to share them with you, so remember these tips because they’ll come in handy.

  • If you have a large website, we suggest that you prioritize your pages and start with the ones that are the most important to you. These could be the pages that drive the most search traffic, leads, or conversions or those that are critical for brand awareness (home page, contact page, etc.). Once these pages are fine, you can proceed to the less important ones. You can identify such pages with the help of Google Analytics 4.
  • Use the Page Changes Monitor tool under the Website Audit module to track important pages and monitor the changes made to them. It’s in the left-hand navigation bar and detects any changes to the pages you add, such as title, description, headings, content, internal and external links, robots.txt, HTTP code, canonical URL, and so on. You’ll also get notifications about these updates.
Add pages to monitor changes
  • The first time is an accident, the second time is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. In the context of website audits,  look for error patterns. One-time errors can still be a problem, but if the same error occurs repeatedly, you should probably reconsider your overall approach.
  • Pretend you’re a detective who uses a red string to connect related crimes. You’re basically doing the same during the audit when analyzing the relationship between errors found. If, for example, an audit reveals that you don’t have enough text on the page, this will result in an unsatisfactory text-to-HTML ratio.
  • Don’t forget about your competitors. If you’ve found an ambiguous error or can’t decide on a possible solution to the problem, check how your competitors solved it. Conduct a competitive website audit to determine the approach your rivals took and whether it worked.
LAUNCH COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
Identify your closest rivals and spy on them the smart way!

And, of course, use filters to view and analyze web pages and find links and resources according to the parameters you need. In the preceding section, we discussed how to use them. If you suspect a problem exists, you can apply filters to catch it faster.

Comprehensive website audit checklist

We’ve compiled a technical audit checklist to help you analyze the site and not miss anything. It contains all the basic checks that you need to carry out. You can follow it step by step or adapt it to your needs and mark every box once you complete the inspection.

Website technical audit checklist

Once you compile your own website auditing checklist and ran the checks your website requires, you’ll be able to see what corrections you need to make. Now it’s time to prioritize them, which is what our next section is about.

Prioritizing website audit fixes

Now that you have all of this information, you need a plan. It’s impossible to do everything at once, but even if it was possible, it would require a lot of resources—people, time, and money. Lacking even one of these resources can lead to poor-quality fixes. Prioritizing website corrections allows you to get better results in less time and with fewer resources.

Consider the severity of the problem

Severity means how serious the issue is and how much damage it causes to your site. Classify all the problems by critical, major, and minor and assign a high, medium, or low priority to each issue.

This is where categorizing errors in Website Audit can help. Errors such as 4XX status codes for pages/links/images/files, and pages blocked by robots.txt, for example, are critical and should be prioritized.

You should also consider your niche and specifics when identifying issue severity. Navigation and pagination issues can be more critical on an ecommerce website than on a portfolio website. Or, for instance, it isn’t considered an error when a PPC landing page has no inbound links. 

Consider page importance

Pages that sell the most, drive the most organic traffic to your site or inform your clients about your brand, are essential. 

Depending on your goals, this list of important pages can grow, and you should consider it when prioritizing fixes. Minor errors, such as external links to 3XX or JavaScript that are not cached, can cause trouble to critical pages and lower their performance.

Consider the scope of the problem

If the issue affects the entire site rather than individual pages, you can prioritize it. Such global problems weaken the site as a whole, and correcting minor flaws on individual pages won’t help.

Another crucial aspect is an issue occurrence. Errors that occur frequently can be dangerous because they require more than a one-time fix and necessitate a change in some site configurations.

Consider the impact and effort needed

This method prioritizes the errors that are easier and faster to fix. Some corrections can be extremely important, but they can be rather difficult to implement. This method suggests that you grab the low-hanging fruit and fix the tasks requiring less effort but still bring value to your website fast. We call it a quick win. 

The impact/effort matrix looks like this:

Impact and effort distributing matrix

Keep in mind, however, that if your CMS or other solutions have any plugin, framework, or tool that can quickly solve some of the issues, the distribution of effort can change. You’ll be able to accomplish more laborious tasks faster. 

Prioritization requires that all team members participate, especially those who are on the development team. Developers can help you determine how much time and effort it will take to solve a problem. 

How to make TA for the development team

Wrongly set tasks lead to unsatisfactory results, so convey all the necessary task information to the development team. This typically applies to large sites, technical companies, and agencies where different teams have to interact and coordinate their workflows. 

The more clearly and transparently you set tasks, the easier it is for devs to understand what problems they must solve and the scope of work involved. The team can start work without wasting time mulling over the issues. Poorly set tasks can also lead to stress and tension within the team because they don’t describe the problem and possible solutions to it fully. Irrationally set ones, on the other hand, prioritize issues that don’t bring much value in the first place. As an insult to injury, they often require more effort and money to complete.

Here’s what you need to specify in your technical assignment to the development team. This is a basic template that you can adapt to your needs and to your workflow.

TA template for developers

Here’s how it looks in real life:

Real-life TA for developers

Depending on your workflow and the scope of your issue, you may also want to add:

  • Time estimate. This is the time period with which the task is estimated to be solved.
  • Attachments. Attach any resources that can help developers better understand the problem or fix it faster.
  • Task dependencies. Some tasks can be connected, allowing you to mark whether your task is waiting for another task to be completed. This is beneficial in collaborative workflows.

Closing thoughts

A regular comprehensive website audit is essential for anyone with a website who wants to climb to the top of the SERPs and win the hearts of their users. It can help you:

  • Identify site weaknesses and other issues that need to be fixed.
  • Detect potential problems and fix them before they become more serious.
  • Get technical insights into how both search engines and users perceive your website.
  • Assess how well your website complies with the latest online requirements.
  • Boost your SEO efforts and reach your business goals faster.

All of this, however, is only possible if you use a high-quality SEO tool to check the site. It should be configurable and provide detailed reports on every issue. You should be able to compare audit results and monitor the effectiveness of fixes. It should also be comprehensive and user-friendly. 

We designed our Website Audit with all these considerations in mind, and update it regularly to provide accurate information for detected issues. So, without further ado, go to the tool and check any site for errors following our complete website audit checklist.

RUN A WEBSITE AUDIT
Score your website in 2 minutes.

Enter any website URL to get a detailed report on tech issues and suggested solutions.

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