Website Design Audit—6 Important Questions for Auditing Your Website
Website Design Audit—6 Important Questions for Auditing Your Website
When you take time, effort and money to build a website, you want to have the best first impression possible. You want your website to capture the attention of viewers and have them stay awhile and look around a bit. But you’ll need more than just a pretty first impression to keep viewers on your page. You’ll also want to have a website that is straightforward and easy for your viewers to navigate. Most likely you’ll also want them to buy something from you, or book a call with you to learn more about you and your offers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that your website is not a one and done event. It is a place to showcase your business that is ever evolving and changing. You’ll want to revisit and update your website to reflect these changes with your business as well as stay modern and relevant with the changing times.
There is a lot of strategy that goes into creating a beautifully designed website that is aimed to convert your viewers from that initial first impression to a buyer and ultimately into your biggest fan. One way you can assess if your current website is up to date and working for you is to do a Website Audit.
Now you can certainly hire Sisu Site Shop or any other Website Designer out there to do this for you, but you might want to start by doing a quick audit yourself. Here are six questions included in every Website Audit we do and a great starting place for you.
1 | Can your viewer easily book a service with you or buy a product?
Most websites have one main goal, to sell a product or service. What is your goal and does your website help you achieve that goal?
If you are an artist, you want to sell your work. If you are an educator, you want to sell your membership or courses. If you are a hotel or venue you want to book your rooms or venue. If you are a restaurant, you want to book reservations, entice your viewer to come in and eat or order carry out. If you are a coach, you want to sell your one-on-one sessions or a group program. If you are a web designer, like me you want to sell website templates or design spots. Am I right?
If you are not looking to sell or serve, you may have an expensive hobby, which is lovely and important in its own right, but it’s not a business. Even so, you’ll have a specific thing you want your viewers to read or learn before leaving your site.
Some of your viewers will come ready to book or buy from you. Can they do this from your home page? Can they do this without scrolling or clicking through multiple pages? If your answer is yes, great job! If not, you have found your first opportunity to improve your website! Let’s continue on shall we.
2 | Is your website simple to use and easy to navigate?
Not all you viewers to your website will be ready to book or buy from you. Some will need more information about your products or services and others will be hearing about you for the first time.
How your viewer uses and navigates your website is called User Experience, UX, for short. You want to make your website as simple and user friendly as possible. You want your viewer to be able to find the information they are looking for.
One way to achieve simplicity is to limit your main navigation to 3-5 items. This provides a clear path for the user to take without getting confused as to where to go next. Additional links should live on your footer. Here you’d want to link to your main pages, secondary pages, and legal pages. Every website is required to have certain legal requirements and disclosures. They also need to be viewable from every page on the website. Putting these links in your footer ensures they are always accessible.
Additionally, you’ll likely want to guide your viewer on a journey, your Client Journey. You want to lead your viewer through the pages of your website to your end destination. This may be your shop, service(s), or sales page(s), where they can book or buy. Along this journey, you need to explain how your product or service will help your viewer and solve a problem they are experiencing.
Your client journey is a huge piece of your overall website strategy. Here are a few more questions to ask yourself about the client journey:
Is your website strategically designed with the client journey strategy in mind?
Does your viewer know exactly where you want them to go or what you want them to do next?
Can the viewer flow from one page to the next through the journey?
Do you have a plan for how you want the viewer to use your site?
Have you tested it and gotten feedback on if it’s working for them? I often find it's really important to have testers from different generations and skill level test a site. Each group will have insights that you will not have considered.
Does the viewer leave confused?
Can they navigate to most pages on the website with a click of one button or link?
Do you have a Call to Action, CTA, for each page?
Are your CTAs clear, easy to find, and consistent? Do your CTAs stand out?
Do you actually tell people what you do or sell?
Do you ask them to work with you?
The last thing you want is for your viewer to leave confused or not be able to find what they were looking for. Next up, we will chat about one way to help eliminate confusion on your website. It has to do with being clear in your branding.
3 | Are your branding, colors, fonts, and photos consistent?
Branding is how people recognize your specific business. Branding consists of the visual elements that represent your business. These elements include your business name, logo, secondary logos, and sub marks.
Branding also includes your color palette, typography, photographs, graphics and taglines. These elements need to be cohesive and compliment your business and website goals.
Logos
Your main logo needs to be clearly identifiable and easy to read. A logo may be a graphic that represents your brand or a stylized version of your business name. You’ll want to have versions that are dark and light to go over backgrounds of the opposite colors. Submarks are variations of your logo. They act like a stamp. Often they are square or circular.
Color Palette
The color palette for your website starts with your main background color and main text color. Additionally, you may want a secondary background color, secondary text color and an accent color.
Use additional accent colors in the graphic design element for your website. Again you're seeking consistency. Too many color choices will dilute your branding and potentially confuse your viewer. Also, be aware of the contrast needed between your text and background colors. This is especially important for accessibility. Items that are too similar are hard for viewers with low vision and color blindness to see. Check your color contrast with my favorite tool from WebAIM.
Typography
Typography refers to the fonts you use for your band. When choosing fonts for your website, limit them to two, sometimes three font families. This small number of fonts ensures consistency and helps keep your page load speed fast. Page load speed is the time it takes for your page to load once it's clicked. If you spend any time browsing the web you know how important this is. People are impatient! If your page doesn’t load quickly, they are very unlikely to stick around waiting for it.
Now that you understand the elements that go into crafting your brand you can use these additional branding questions to help delve a little deeper:
Do you have these branding elements in place?
Are they working together to build your brand?
Do you know the aesthetics that you are going for?
Can you describe what your ideal viewer, not you, wants your website to feel like in three words?
Does your website reflect the three descriptive words?
Does your website provide the experience you want when visiting your site?
Are you using consistent typography and colors or are they all over the place?
Is your text consistent? Are you using two to three fonts? Any more than that is too many.
Do you have too much or too small of text? 16pt is recommended for body text and 24pt for headlines. The majority of viewers are now using their phone.
Can they read the words on your page or do they have to zoom out 2-3 times?
Do your photos enhance or degrade the viewer's experience?
Are they professional or at least professional looking?
Are they too dark or too grainy?
Do the colors and feel of your photos consistent and match that of your website?
Do they have a similar tone or color?
Do they have a similar feel?
Are they serious vs playful, DIY vs luxury?
Your branding like your website is something that needs to be revisited every so often, especially at the beginning of your business journey. I tend to find new businesses have the most opportunity to improve their branding as they refine and solidify their ideal clients and hone their messaging to reach them. I also find established brands that have not revisited their branding in the last decade to be in need of a freshening up of their colors and wording to capture the attention of up and coming generations. Which brings me to the next topic:
4 | Are the words on your site confident and do they answer all the questions your viewers may have?
The language that you use on your website needs to be consistent and confident. You need to tell your viewers what you do or sell. You also need to show the benefits. How your solution will help your viewer achieve something or overcome a problem.
Is your language passive and timid or confident? If your language is more passive your readers won’t hang around on your site very long.
So, how do you know if you're writing with a passive voice? Well lucky for you I am guilty of this! I've started using a great tool to help you figure this out.
Hemingway App is like having your own personal editor. Once you open the webpage, just copy and paste what you're writing into it. The program will highlight sentences that are confusing and difficult to read plus the places you are using a passive voice.
When you're done just copy and paste your revised work back into your original workspace. I use the Hemingway App for nearly every piece of writing I do now. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think!
Next, you’ll need to answer all the questions your viewer may have. You can do this through a section of frequently asked questions, FAQs.
You can also create a “who this is for” section. This goes into details about who this product or service best serves. You may want to contrast this with a “who this is not for” section. This will help ensure the people buying from you are the right people and reduce requests for returns and refunds.
Another thing to keep in mind when writing your copy for your website–people scan websites. Do you have easy to read information on your site or long paragraphs? Remember, we are not writing a five paragraph essay nor a research paper here.
You want to convey the information your viewer needs as quickly and easily as possible. You want your words to lead them to a buying decision. One way to do this is to highlight the experiences of your previous clients.
5 | Do you have any social proof on your website?
People want to know what other people think about your product or service. Testimonials and reviews from former clients or customers are a great way to add social proof to your website.
This is one of the things I look for when I’m buying something new. When purchasing anything online these days I first head to the reviews. If I’m buying a piece of clothing I’m looking for more information about how an item fits. When I’m buying household products, I’m looking for other people's opinions on how well the product works or lasts.
When I’m looking to buy a course to learn something new, I’m looking for feedback. I want to know how easy a course is to follow, if people complete it, and if they see the results they were hoping for.
People love to share their opinions and most often that can be very helpful to you. In my web design business testimonials are key. I let my new clients know at the very beginning of a project, I want their honest feedback about their experience and will be asking for a testimonial when it's complete. After we've designed the website and had our official launch party, I send them an email with an attached testimonial form. I also follow up with them over time to see how their website is doing.
I’ve learned so much from my clients' feedback over the years. It helps me adjust the way I run projects and VIP days so they’ll be even better. It also helps my prospective clients understand what working with me will be like.
Finally, no website audit would be complete without questioning the responsiveness of your website and how easy it is to use on a phone.
6 | Can you easily read and navigate your website on your phone?
Is your site responsive? Responsiveness refers to the ability of your content to work on all devices. Desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.
Did you know that according to Techjury 52% of internet traffic comes from mobile phones. This trend has been ever increasing for the last ten years. And it is expected to continue to keep gaining over desktop usage.
With the ever increasing use of phones as peoples’ primary device, your website needs to be responsive.
Built-in responsiveness is one of the things I love about building websites in Squarespace. Now with their release of the Fluid Engine editor you can easily edit the mobile view of your website too. If you have questions about Fluid Engine, check out this post. I wrote a roundup of 12 of Squarespaces’ updates including Fluid Engine.
One simple way to ensure your website is easy to read is to check your minimum font size. As I stated earlier, 16pt is recommended for body text and 24pt for headlines. It is a pain the the *** to have to zoom in and out of a website just to read it. This is an area of big contention for me when it comes to your email marketing, but that is a discussion for another day.
Well that should be more than enough questions to get you started auditing your website design! I hope these questions will help you honestly evaluate your website. You will be able to determine what areas are working great and what areas you can improve. Then make your own website improvements checklist and start tackling them one at a time.
If you’ve found this blog helpful, I boiled down all the info for you in an easy to follow Website Audit Checklist. I created a Simplified Checklist version that just includes the 6 main questions and a Detailed Checklist that includes all of the additional questions in each category. Take a sec to download our Website Audit Checklist!
Are you still stuck? Do you want a professional set of eyes to review and audit your website? We can help you with that too! Fill out our Website Audit Request. You’ll submit your website url and let us know what you think about your site. We’ll assess your website and send you a video recording within 3 business days with our overview and suggestions! This might be the best $97 investment you make!
Squarespace New Features Series:
Squarespace New Features Roundup: Fall & Winter 2021-22
Squarespace New Features Spotlight: Auto Layouts
Squarespace New Features Spotlight: Hosted Background Video + Video Pages
New Website Launch Posts:
New Squarespace Website for a Public Library—Chouteau County Library
New Squarespace Website for a Golf Course & Events Center—Wedgewood Cove
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Hej! Thanks for stopping in! Sisu Site Shop is an online business strategy + custom brand and web design studio. We sell Squarespace 7.1 templates and offer VIP Days for brand + web design for small businesses including Artists, Educators, and Hospitality Professionals. We serve clients worldwide from our current home base in Idaho. We help you start, organize, and modernize your business, brand, and website so that you can sell, serve, and stand out online. If you have a project in mind we’d love to learn more about it!
When you’re ready here are three ways we can help you:
When you’re ready here are three ways we can help you:
Template Shop & Semi-Custom Website Design: Our custom Squarespace 7.1 templates provide a professionally designed foundation for you to build upon and customize! You can even upgrade to a semi-custom service and we’ll customize the template with your brand and photos.
VIP Design Day: Our 1 day or more Brand or Web day can help you create a strategy, create simple branding, build a simple website, and knock these to-dos off your list in no time!
Design Lab—Custom Brand Identity & Website Design: Truly elevate your online presence with a custom design lab experience. We will partner with you to craft a brand & website you can’t wait to share!
We also have many tips and resources about strategy, design, and starting an online business. If we were chatting face to face, we’d offer you some tea and invite you to hang out for a while. Please consider this invitation to explore our site and learn more about our journey with the same intention!
When you’re ready to start your journey, build your business, and find your freedom, check out our Discovery Call Calendar today!