04 The Redesign Process

Website audit

Before redesigning your site, it’s worth capturing a snapshot of where you are. A website audit is a health check on your current site. What’s working? What isn’t? Where are the opportunities for improvement?

The audit doesn’t need to be huge. In fact, I recommend keeping it short and sweet otherwise it won’t be read and used.

What to audit

When I audit a website, these are the things I look at:

  • Performance. How quickly do pages load? How do desktop and mobile loading times differ? It’s easy to check your site’s speed with a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Slow websites lose visitors, conversions, and rankings. See Great websites are fast.
  • Accessibility. Does the site meet WCAG guidelines? Is there sufficient colour contrast so text is readable? Can you navigate the site with just a keyboard? What about with a screen reader? See Great websites are accessible.
  • SEO. Is the site properly indexed? Has an XML sitemap been submitted to search engines? Are there broken links or crawl errors? Do images have alt text? See SEO fundamentals.
  • Analytics. If you have analytics, review them. If you don’t, install analytics on your current site now so you have data to work with. What are your most visited pages? What pages are visited least often? Where does traffic come from? What is the desktop/mobile split?
  • Usability. Go through some of the key user journeys. Or, even better, ask someone who isn’t familiar with the website to complete a task. Is the navigation clear? Do visitors know where to go next? Is key content clearly signposted? Are calls to action clear?
  • Content. Is it accurate and up to date? Which pages need keeping, updating, or removing? Which pages hold your key content, and which will need the most attention during the redesign?

It can be useful to get a fresh perspective on your website. I’ve audited websites for many charities and organisations. Get in touch if you’d like help with yours.

Benchmarking

There are two ways to benchmark your site:

  • Against your peers. Find other charities/organisations similar to yours, and see how they’re doing. PageSpeed Insights and WAVE work on any public URL.
  • Against yourself. Your audit – speed scores, traffic, conversion rates, and accessibility issues – creates a baseline to compare your new site against.

Useful tools

There are plenty of useful tools out there. These are the tools I use and recommend.

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