- Today, we're talking about how to audit your website
as a web designer or developer here on The Journey.
The full scope of benefits that come from
website audits is massive.
The goal is to improve your client's online visibility,
grow new revenue sources, and enhance the overall experience
customers have with utilizing your services.
But if you haven't been prioritizing your performance
metrics in your build, this video is for you.
- Maybe you've heard of the famous proverb,
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
And the second best time is now.
It's never too late to start.
Well, the ever evolving platform algorithms
may seem like a lot to keep up with, totally get that,
but it doesn't have to involve a difficult task
to stay current, no.
Comprehensive web presence audits are quite a bit more
than just a performance automation,
reviewing everything from the brands image to content
optimization and even security,
which we've talked a lot about on The Journey,
will provide you with valuable insights into your overall
online presence.
- And here's the thing, Google's page experience metrics
and core web vitals can get pretty technical pretty quickly.
And even for designers and developers who are familiar with
this territory, taking action on these
performance action items can get pretty complicated.
And if you haven't considered how these new changes
will impact your online presence,
then please consider this your official wake up call.
- All right, let's get started with your
website performance audit.
And fortunately, when it comes to monitoring
your website's performance, guess what?
There's some great free benchmark testing tools.
There's Google page speed insights,
also Chrome user experience report.
And you can even search consoles core web vitals report.
But remember if your site doesn't accommodate
Google's new requirements,
it's likely that your SEO ranking will suffer.
Don't want that,
and it will be harder to find your website online.
- And for those of you for using WordPress
to build your websites, I've got a couple of great
performance optimization plugins as well.
WP Rocket for code optimization,
Smush Pro for image compression and lazy load,
and disable cart fragments
for that WooCommerce optimization.
Basically your performance score is made up of these
key metrics starting with First Contentful Paint.
And it's basically the time the page starts loading
to when any part of the page shows up on the screen.
Then you've got your speed index,
which is how quickly content shows up
when your website loads.
Largest Contentful paint is how long it takes for the
largest image or text box on your website to load.
Time to interactive is basically how long it takes for when
your webpage starts to load to when someone can actually
interact with the loading resources like clicking another
page or a button or a link.
Then there's total blocking time.
It's just the total amount of time between the first content
paintful and the time to interactive.
And then lastly, we have cumulative layout shift
and it's just the total layout shift score
for your entire website.
So if your website loads and there's kind of elements
kind of shift randomly, it's bad for accessibility.
So they wanted to make sure that score is really really low.
- And here are three additional categories that
Google measures: loading time,
the name kind of gives it away.
The loading time is how fast the main content
in your page loads.
Interactivity measures the time for when someone
first clicks on your page to when the browser,
so Google Chrome or Safari begins processing that info.
And then visual stability means that your site is free of
distracting or unexpected content like a popup window.
- Your accessibility score is another important metric.
It measures how accessible your site is
to different kinds of people.
So a couple of examples of things that Google checks for are
a high contrast between your site background and your text,
captions on videos, and then alt text on images.
- And Google also grades on the overall SEO performance,
as well as adherence to best practices,
and speed, and reliability,
and then sites that get a high score across all of these
categories will perform better in a Google search.
- And one thing I want you all to keep in mind is
web presence auditing is an ongoing process.
It can be helpful to get started by breaking your audit down
into manageable daily or even weekly sprints,
really in order to help keep track of your results and
findings as you go.
The second step is then to prioritize your sprints,
which we highly recommend putting into performance audit
at that top of the list.
- Now, there's no such thing as a finished product.
You've heard me say that before.
And when it comes to maintaining and evolving
online presence, keep that in mind.
Simply put, staying in line with the current trends
and the changes in the web environments
is critical to the success of your business.
The changes to Google search will for sure present
challenges to many business owners,
but with some hard work, making the necessary fixes
will pay off.
- And as always your journey does not have to end here.
We have over 200 videos to help you with your business and
with your clients.
Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe.
This is The Journey.
We'll see you next time.