Imagine this: a potential customer clicks on your link and then sits there, waiting forever for the page to load. Or they struggle to find information on your products or services. Perhaps one look at the design has their heads spinning, and they quickly move to another platform.
It sounds scary, but it doesn’t have to be. All of these issues can easily be caught—and fixed—with a website audit. It can catch everything from slow page loading and disjointed editorial workflows to search visibility and, in turn, help improve conversion rates and SEO, among other things.
Let’s take a deeper look into what a website audit is and how it can help take your health and wellness platform to the next level.
What Is a Website Audit?
Think of it this way—a website audit is essentially a comprehensive health check for your website. It looks into how well it’s performing in terms of user experience, security, usability, search engine optimization (SEO), and more. It helps you to discover your site’s weak points and figure out ways to fix them.
What makes a website audit different from others, such as an SEO, performance, or UX audit? A website audit is going to be a big picture look at how your health and wellness site is doing, while the others are deeper, more specific audits that look into very distinct areas. There are aspects of those other audits that are or could be included in a website audit, but it’s not going to go super deep into them.
An SEO audit is going to deep dive into how well your site is optimized for search engines. A performance audit is going to look at the speed, efficiency, and resource utilization of your site in order to find bottlenecks that can affect loading times and responsiveness. This is a more technical audit that can help your site run smoothly. A UX audit looks at how users interact with your website. This focuses on usability, accessibility, and overall user satisfaction. It identifies pain points, areas of friction, and design flaws that could slow user engagement and conversions.
There are many reasons to perform a website audit on your health and wellness platform. The important thing is to find the weak points and fix them so that your platform can have a more satisfactory user experience, better search engine rankings, and more engagement from your users.
Why a Website Audit is Crucial for Your Brand
Having a website that functions smoothly is important not just for the overall user experience but also for your bottom line. About 61 percent of users said they will go to another website if they can’t find what they’re looking for within five seconds, according to Forbes. That could be valuable business that you’re losing because users can’t navigate your platform easily, whether it’s waiting for it to load or not finding relevant information.
If your health and wellness website has slow loading times, a bad design, broken links, or any other factors that can be uncovered in a website audit, it can create a bad audience experience and turn potential clients away, which ultimately lowers your conversion rates.
Part of a website audit is looking at your Core Web Vitals, which focuses on aspects that directly affect how clients perceive and interact with your website. It can help to pinpoint areas where your site is underperforming, so we can then go in with targeting optimization and address those issues. This could be anywhere from excessive JavaScript to unstable page layouts.
It’s also important to look at your site search in a website audit and how easy it is overall to navigate your website. That same report from Forbes said that users spend an average of 6.44 seconds looking at a website’s navigation menu. If your health and wellness site has complicated or hard-to-use navigation, you could be losing potential clients.
Ndevr’s 3E FrameworkTM Approach to Audits
At Ndevr, we take the 3E FrameworkTM approach to our website audits: Audience Experience, Creator Experience, Developer Experience. We believe taking this well-rounded look at your website performance helps to cover all aspects. It ensures that no rock is left unturned when it comes to getting your site running smoothly and converting clicks into revenue.
Before making improvements, we need to find where the biggest vulnerabilities lie and focus on the most impactful areas. Let’s break this down even more.
- Audience Experience: We do a performance audit to analyze site speak, UX/UI, and audience engagement metrics to find bottlenecks affecting user experience. This also includes a security audit, ensuring that your site is safe and secure.
- Creator Experience: We take a look at your editorial workflow to identify any inefficiencies. We also look for any manual tasks that are slowing your content teams down.
- Developer Experience: Part of this is assessing your development workflows, security risks, and DevOps processes to find any sources of instability.
While the creator and developer experiences might not look directly related to the website, they are included in our audit as they are all interconnected and affect the customer-facing side of the website.
When all three of these areas are optimized, this will help your health and wellness platform thrive, even when under pressure. Our website audit is intended to eliminate any risk by addressing imbalances. This will make sure that your platform can support growth and scale.
From Audit to Optimization
One of our clients came to us with a website that was, essentially, not working. They faced frequent outages that heavily affected traffic and ad revenue. We jumped in with a website audit and were able to find what the issue was. The premium theme was the root cause of all their performance issues.
Using New Relic, we were able to collect metrics and find issues with the theme by looking at the code and content. Using this, we went in and were able to make the necessary fixes to speed up the website, as well as stop the outages. This, in turn, increased the website’s traffic.
Whatever issues your health and wellness platform is having, our thorough website audit will find them, and we can use that data to find the best ways to overcome them.
Start With a Website Fragility Audit
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