Step-by-Step Guide to Auditing Your WordPress Site
Your WordPress site must be audited regularly to determine how your site is working overall and how well it is performing, just as your finances and taxes must be audited. The real question, however, is: How do you audit your WordPress website? Performing periodic audits of your WordPress site is not hard. Maintaining your website and ensuring everything is in working order is like following a routine. WordPress maintenance is part of your website, from its design to building it. This is the best in-depth guide to help you audit your WordPress website.
How to audit your WordPress site?
The steps are given below:
Keep WordPress Up-to-Date
One of the most well-maintained CMS platforms is WordPress. In an effort to expand and enhance its functionality, it updates and releases new versions. WordPress developers all over the world work daily to create improved platforms.
First things first, check if there are any WordPress updates on your site. Are there any new developments? Has the latest version and updates been installed on your site? Have you updated all your WordPress plugins?
When performing an audit for WordPress updates, ensure that your site has no outdated software and plugins.
Analyse the Performance of WordPress
Measuring the speed of your website has become essential to ensuring that it is always up and running and optimising its speed.
The first step should be auditing your performance metrics. Check your website's reaction time, conversion rate, bounce rate, loading speed, and other such metrics. Google Page Speed Insights can be used for reliable findings.
Study WordPress Security.
In a WordPress audit, your priority should be to check your WordPress security. For a website owner, WordPress security is an absolute policy. As WordPress is the most popular CMS platform, malware, security threats, and hacks often target it.
It's always a good idea to monitor the activity logs on your website. You can figure out if someone's altering settings or getting access where they shouldn't be by checking what users are doing in the backend.
SEO Optimisation:
One key element of your site is SEO. Your WordPress site will lack organic reach, online presence, and commercial revenue if SEO is neglected. If you're using free WordPress themes, it's essential to verify that they are SEO-friendly, as not all free options are built with strong optimisation in mind. Monitoring your SEO performance and ensuring it is search engine optimised is thus crucial.
How can an SEO audit be conducted? The initial step is using an SEO audit tool to crawl your site. It will help you audit all the URLS in your site and search for any mistakes on primary pages, e.g., broken links, absent meta tags, or alt tags.
To maintain your website's SEO on track, you can also add the best SEO plugin. It helps you review your website for search engine optimisation issues and assess your overall performance based on a variety of critical on-page optimisation criteria.
Look at the Analytics of Your Site
It's also important to monitor your website analytics when assessing your WordPress website. How your website performs on search engines and people's behavior is what we refer to as website analytics. It's designed to collect, analyse, and apply website data to boost your figures.
There can be one or two blog posts or websites on your site that get significantly more traffic than others. Yet, you could miss out on some great conversion opportunities if you don't recognise which ones bring in the most traffic.
Therefore, it's critical to monitor your website's statistics and record monthly visitors and conversion rates. This will assist in improving your website for conversions and organic leads.
Test for Mobile Responsiveness
Today, it is probable that more than 50% of the visitors to your website are using mobile phones to view it. Creating a website that is easy to use and responsive on a lot of different devices is an important goal for most web developers. That's why it's so important to ensure that your website works perfectly well on lots of different devices and looks amazing.
One simple and fast way to test whether your website is mobile-friendly or not is by using Google's free Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. Free WordPress themes users should ensure the optimisation for various screen sizes, as not all themes are built with mobile responsiveness in mind.
Conclusion:
You don't have to make keeping your WordPress site so complicated. You can monitor for potential issues and keep your site running smoothly by using these easy steps. Each step, from testing functionality to boosting performance to checking user accounts, assists you in ensuring that you and your users have an improved experience.