How to do a Website Review

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Website Review Training

Why Do a Website Review?

A website review is a way to measure how your website is doing against certain parameters. It allows you to make informed decisions about what to change (or not to!) It is a great tool to help clean up and reorganize your website.

A review of your site can:

Improve SEO (search engine optimization)
Help get targeted traffic to your site
Make your website easier for visitors to navigate
Get things organized and make it easier to work with your content and assets
Ensure your website is fulfilling its purpose

Here are five steps that make for a good website review:

Consider the goals of your website
Do a content audit
Look at Google Analytics
Review your navigation
Take action

Step 1: Consider the Goals of your Website

Before diving into the stats, it is worth thinking about the purpose of your website. Having clear goals and questions you want answered, will help you wade through the analytics in a meaningful way.

Take a few moments to consider the following:

What are your site’s goals and objectives?
Who is your target audience?
How will you engage your community? What do you want them to do at your site?

Try to look at your site from a visitor’s perspective. It may be helpful to have someone who is less familiar with your site have a look and give their thoughts. Does your site seem to be fulfilling its purpose? What are first impressions?

Use the answers to these questions to inform your review as your delve deeper into the content and analytics.

Step 2: Do a Content Audit

Before making changes, it’s helpful to know what you have on your site right now.

Websites can easily grow quite large and sometimes older pages push out newer pages in search. Also the more content you have, the more work it is to manage. There may be some old pages or posts that you can delete.

Next we’ll look at the analytics to help decide what pages are working for you.

Step 3: Look at your Analytics

How is your site performing overall?

Have a look at your Google analytics for the past year by setting the date range at the top right. Go to Audience > Overview. Take note of users, sessions, page views, session duration and bounce rate.

In the date range, click Compare To and select Previous Year. Take note of trends. Is the number of users and page views going up or down? Why might this be?

What pages are people looking at? What pages do you want viewed?

Some other interesting statistics to look at include: top 10 most viewed pages, 10 least viewed pages, pages that have high bounce rates and pages with less than 3 seconds average view.

Pay special attention to your homepage. How many page views? How long did people stay on this page? What is the bounce rate like? How did they get there (Email, search etc.)?

To find information on page popularity, go to Behaviour > Overview.

Step 4 – Review your Navigation

Your navigation should make it easy for users to find things.

Have a look at your left hand menu.

Is it simple and clear or overwhelming?
How many items and sub items are in your navigation?

The navigation menu should guide people through your website without being overwhelming. Keep it simple and concise. You do not have to put everything in there! Try to keep the main nav to around 7 items or less.

Go deeper by looking at the page views in your navigation to see how many come from the homepage. It’s not an exact science, but this will give you an idea of how well your navigation is working for these particular pages.

Go to Behaviour > Overview
Click view full report at the bottom of the list of pages
Click on the page of interest (or search for it)
Go to Secondary Dimension > Behaviour > Previous Page Path
Note how many page views come from the homepage

Step 5 – Take Action!

Now that you have done a site review, make sure to put all this great information to use! Perhaps you can rework your navigation, delete some pages or change the content on your homepage.

Just pick one thing to start with. Go back to the analytics in a few months to see if your change had any effect.

A good website is always evolving. And a site review can help you make decisions about what to change. It is a helpful thing to do regularly. Put aside a bit of time each year to review your site. This helps keep it up to date, makes sure visitors are finding what they need and ensures good performance.

Download the template below to get started with your website review.