How To Do a Website Audit: Your 2025 Guide With 10 Easy Steps

The purpose of a website audit is to spotlight areas for improvement, making sure that your website is firing on all cylinders. Let’s take a look at how you can do just that in 10 steps.

1. Pinpoint Your Audience and Their Goals

Your target audience is at the heart of your website audit. All aspects of your website, from its content to your homepage design, should accommodate their unique customer needs and inspire continued engagement with your business.

That’s why I recommend thinking about the customer journey first, since it’ll help you understand how users might be engaging with your website. It also gives you the chance to see if your website’s current design, performance, and SEO strategy is aligned with what your audience is looking for.

Specific user factors to consider include:

• Why audiences are accessing your website – Maybe they need to purchase a product, find a specific piece of information, or create a quick booking through your sign-up forms. Your website should make this process easy.
• How audiences are finding your website – Use free analytical tools like Google Analytics 4 to see where your website traffic is coming from, be it through organic search results, referrals, social media pages, or elsewhere. It should be easy for your audience to navigate between these touchpoints.
• Your audience’s pain points – What common issues might your audience encounter on your website? These could include confusing on-site navigation, sections with poor accessibility, or waffly content that doesn’t answer their key questions. From here, you can identify areas that need optimizing the most.

2. Gather Your Essential Tools and Resources

You can’t conduct a successful website audit without the right tools. To help you identify problem areas, I’ve rounded up the tools which you may find useful:

3. Collaborate With the Relevant Team Members

It’s harder to conduct a successful website audit alone, since you’ll need to collaborate with a wider team and make use of their specialist skills. If in-house, your first port of call is typically the web development team, since they’re responsible for building and maintaining your website’s performance.

You may want to work closely with:

• UX designers – If your website user experience needs an upgrade, UX professionals can help you enhance each page’s design for visitors. For example, they may know about the best website fonts that are also accessible, or are able to create new page wireframes for a website redesign.
• QA engineers – A Quality Assurance (QA) engineer can test your website’s performance and identify issues (like bugs) that could negatively impact the user experience.
• Web developers – To action improvements, you’ll need assistance from your web developers. They’ll also help you maintain your website and upgrade it when necessary.

4. Audit Your Website’s Content

Is your content marketing strategy working? To find out, you’ll need to audit your website’s content and hunt for SEO and readability issues that could impact audience engagement. You can identify content issues with the following steps.

Assess Your Content’s Structure and Readability

When someone is looking for answers to a specific question online, they don’t want to spend hours searching for it. To make their lives easier, your content should be readable and clearly structured, making it easy for users to find what they need – and fast.

Make sure that your current content:

• Uses headings (like H2s, H3s, etc) to label what each section contains
• Separates text into short, easy-to-read paragraphs
• Keeps sentences short and concise
• Avoids complex jargon that’s difficult to understand
• Features reader-friendly fonts like Arial or Times New Roman
• Has call to action (CTA) buttons that are easy to read and guide customers toward completing a specific action

Find Gaps in Your Content

Does your content cover the right topics? Does it also answer crucial questions that your audience are most interested in?

Use keyword research to find out.

With SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, you can see what queries users are looking for the most on search engines. Once you’ve identified a list of common keywords or questions, you can compare them to your website’s content and see if there’s anything missing that you need to cover.

Check Your Existing Content for E-E-A-T

During your website audit, I recommend reviewing your content according to E-E-A-T. This is an official framework Google uses to assess the quality of your website content. Though it’s not an official ranking factor, following the four guidelines is an easy way to check that your content is up to scratch.

This is what each letter stands for:

• Experience – If reviewing a product or software, or writing a “How To” article, your content should reflect your firsthand experiences.
• Expertise – Does your content feature useful information for your audience? Make sure that key facts, stats, and data are accurate and fact checked.
• Authority – This concerns whether you’re an authoritative voice in your industry or not. Increase authority by building your digital presence, be it through creating an author bio to showcase your past works or building reputable backlinks to your content.
• Trustworthiness – When creating content, be transparent with your audience. Share your ethical content practices, ask customers for reviews to display on your website where relevant, and include key sections like a Privacy Policy page.

5. Audit Your Website’s Technical Performance

Even if you have high-quality content on your website, customers won’t be able to view and engage with it if your webpages are inundated with technical errors. So, it’s wise to audit your website’s technical performance too. I’ll explain how.

Improve Your Technical SEO

It’s important to enhance technical SEO, since it can increase the likelihood of your website appearing in Google search results. If your website is optimized effectively, it’s much easier for Google to find your different webpages, index them, and display them to users in search once they’ve made a relevant query.

To make improvements to your website’s technical SEO, you should:

• Write meta descriptions and title tags effectively – This metadata appears in search results, so you need to make sure that it accurately reflects what’s featured on each page.
• Check for broken links – Broken links prevent search engines and your audience from finding specific pages on your website. Thankfully, there are free SEO Chrome extensions that can help you track them down, like Check My Links.
• See if your website architecture makes logical sense – The way a website is structured can make all the difference. Your webpages should follow a clear hierarchy and make it easy for users to navigate around your website.

Test Your Page Load Times

According to our website load time stats, pages that appear in Google search results typically take 1.65 seconds to load. To keep up with the competition, your website needs to be equally as speedy. Slow website speeds are also a conversion killer. Your customers don’t have all day, so your content needs to load quickly or they’ll end up looking elsewhere.

The easiest way to test your website’s speed is through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Once you’ve typed in your website URL, the tool will show you key areas for improvement across mobile and desktop devices. This might include lazy-loading off-screen images or reducing the amount of third-party code on your website. With this knowledge in mind, you can start making website-wide improvements to boost your speeds.

Test Your Website on Mobile

Lastly, don’t forget about your mobile visitors. Exploding Topics found that over 63% of website traffic comes from mobile devices in 2025, so making your website smartphone-friendly is essential.

Look out for these key issues when viewing your website on mobile:

• Hyperlinks or CTAs that don’t respond when you click on them
• Content like imagery or videos that disappear or don’t fit on the screen properly
• Pop-ups that feel invasive and are difficult to close

Though Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool no longer exists, websites like BrowserStack let you preview how your website looks on different devices for free.

6. Audit Your Website’s User Experience (UX)

During your website audit, you also need to walk a mile in your visitors’ shoes by testing the user experience. The easier that it is for users to complete a specific action on your website, be it finding an answer to a question or completing a purchase, the more likely that you’re going to see increased conversions.

When auditing your website’s current user experience, here are some common mistakes to look out for:

• Having forms that are difficult to fill in – Forms on your website help users complete specific actions, like signing up for a newsletter or accessing a promotion, and can help you collect valuable data about your audience. Go through the forms on your website and see how easy they are to fill in. You may find that there’s too much information required from the user, or that your form buttons aren’t very responsive.
• Using design elements that don’t make sense – Your website’s design should be stylish but functional. Make sure that design elements add to the user experience, rather than detract from it. For example, use visual cues that help guide visitors around your website, or opt for high contrast colors to make important buttons stand out.
• Not learning from key visitor data – Audience data can also show you if your website has a great user experience. High bounce rates can reveal that users aren’t engaged with your webpage, perhaps due to poor design or navigation, while low conversion rates show that users might be struggling to complete specific actions.

7. Audit Your On-Page SEO

On-page SEO, the SEO practices you implement directly on your webpages, must be in tip-top condition to help improve your page rankings on search. But where do you start?

I’ve listed important on-page SEO practices to consider during your website audit:

• Use the right anchor text SEO for internal links – When linking between different pages on your website, your internal links must feature anchor text that reflects the content on a page. For example, if a user clicks on anchor text that says “best yoga mats”, the link should logically take them to a piece of content listing the best yoga mats to buy.
• Keep your page URLs SEO-friendly – Your URLs should make it clear what each webpage is about. As a general rule of thumb, try to include a front-loaded primary keyword that best reflects the page’s contents.
• Write alternative text for every photo – Alternative text is important for three reasons: it tells visitors what’s featured in an image if a page doesn’t load, gives Google useful information about your website’s imagery, and makes your website accessible for visually-impaired users. So, don’t forget to add alternative text to every photo on your website (unless it’s purely decorative).

Want the two-step solution to writing effective alternative text? Writer Annie Angus learned how to write alternative text the right way after listening to an accessibility expert.

8. Audit Your Off-Page SEO

Now that I’ve covered on-page SEO, it’s time to turn your attention to off-page SEO. As you might’ve guessed, this refers to SEO practices that are actioned outside of your website. The main off-page SEO practice is backlinking, which I’ll explain below.

How to Backlink Effectively

Backlinks are essentially digital endorsements from other brands online and are created when another website links back to one of your webpages. If you want to audit your current backlinks or look for more, keep these pointers in mind:

• Find websites with high domain authority – Quality is key when it comes to backlinks, so make sure that the websites linking back to you have high domain authority. You can use Moz’s free domain analysis checker to check the quality of a website.
• Check out the competition – Looking for more backlinking opportunities? I suggest looking for your competitor’s backlinks. This will allow you to see if there are any link sources that could also be a strong fit for your own website.
• Make sure that your backlinks are relevant – Choose backlinks that feel organic and make sense for your website. For example, you wouldn’t want a spammy website linking to one of your most informative pages.

Other Off-Page SEO Essentials

Before I move on, there are a couple more off-page SEO practices to consider, like reviewing your social media strategy. Look closely at your metrics on each social account. How often are people engaging with your content? And are you reaching the right target audience?

Depending on your answers, you’ll want to make slight changes to your social profiles and content so that they better appeal to your target audience, inspire user engagement, and continue to grow brand awareness. A few examples may include:

• Making sure that you’re on the right platforms (think about which platforms your audiences are likely to use)
• Acing your social media SEO by adding relevant keywords to your social bios
• Actively responding to comments

Additionally, don’t forget to keep an eye on your online reputation and what customers are saying about your business. For successful SEO reputation management, monitor websites like Google Reviews or Yelp, build better customer relationships by holding online events or Q&A sessions, and try to respond to negative reviews with patience and understanding.

9. Track Your Website’s Analytics and Metrics

A key part of your website audit is reviewing your analytics. To make informed changes, your website’s metrics should guide the way, but what should be examined first?

Here are key metrics to review for best results:  

1. Website visitors – The number of visitors entering your website
2. Average time on page – How long your visitors are spending on your pages
3. Conversion rate – This measures the percentage of visitors completing a specific action on your website, like filling in a sign-up form or making a purchase
4. Bounce rate – The number of visitors who leave your website after looking at one page. According to JetPack, an excellent bounce rate in 2025 is between 26%-40%
5. Top landing pages – The pages that your website visitors are frequenting the most
6. Audience location – Where your audiences are coming from geographically

Do note, however, that your business’ most important metrics will depend on your goals. For example, if you run a local candy company that wants to boost sales in the next quarter, you’ll likely pay most attention to your conversion rates.

10. Start Implementing Your Changes

Once you’ve audited the different aspects of your website, from your content quality to your off-page SEO, you can start implementing key changes.

But before you start, pull together all of your user feedback, research, and data, using this information to decide what changes are most important for your website. For example, if your website design needs a huge upgrade for improved usability, while your on-page SEO only requires a few tweaks, put your website redesign first.

However, don’t go wild and make all of your major changes at once. Consistent testing and iterating is key. Instead of editing directly onto your current website, make a prototype first that you’ll test your changes on. This’ll prevent you from accidently publishing something on your website that isn’t ready, while you can also show this prototype to others for further feedback.

Though you now know the ten steps needed to complete a successful website audit, it isn’t a one-and-done deal. Regularly scheduled audits help keep you on top of any issues, giving your team enough time to make additional changes in the future.

Also, as your website grows, I recommend regularly monitoring industry trends alongside any changes to Google’s algorithm. Your website needs to evolve with the times, so keeping on top of the latest news will help you adapt to any significant changes along the way.