Website Audit Tools for Speed, Mobile-Friendliness and Links

Doing a semi-annual or annual audit of your website ensures your website is operating at its full potential. Do this by identifying potential issues that may impair user experience, load times or cause errors.

Although the idea of doing a website audit may sound overwhelming, it’s much easier than it sounds thanks to reliable tools available online. So, even if you’re a small business that doesn’t have a dedicated web developer or technical support team, you can still run an audit.

Below, we list website audit tools for checking website speed, mobile-friendliness and links.

1. Website Speed

Page Loading TimeYour website’s loading speed impacts how long your visitors stay on your page. Today, 47% of users expect webpages to load within 2 seconds and 40% abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Free tools you can use to check the speed of your website include Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom. After you enter your website, both tools will provide suggestions on solutions to speed up load times, such as reducing sizes of specific images.

Pingdom also lists every file that was loaded on the page and their file size. You can use this to target specific files that are slowing down your website. This is especially important if Google PageSpeed Insights gives you a low grade for speed, or if Pingdom says your load time is way over a few seconds.

2. Mobile-Friendliness

As an increasing proportion of web traffic comes from mobile, your website’s mobile friendliness is becoming an essential part of the user experience and search engine rankings. Back in April 2015, Google announced that mobile-friendliness would become a ranking factor for searches from mobile devices.

If you’re not sure your website is mobile-friendly, enter your URL in Google Mobile-Friendly Tool. If your website is built on a content management system like WordPress, one way to make your site mobile-friendly is to change your theme to a newer on that’s designed to be mobile-responsive.

google mobile friendly

3. Broken Links

Broken links can result from you mistyping the target URL or the URL could have changed since you created the link. Broken links can be hard to detect because users usually don’t email you if you find one and you don’t know immediately if the web page you’re pointing to changes their link structure or removes that page.

Fortunately, there are free tools like Broken Link Check which will do a scan of your entire website to identify broken links. The output shows the link that’s broken and the page on your website it’s on, so that you can easily correct the broken link.

broken link check

The tools above will give you a starting point for identifying basic issues with your website, and are perfect to add to your marketing tool box. Even if you are not able to immediate address all the issues that these tools find, you’re at least aware of them and get assistance to fix them.

Are there website audit tools you’d add to this list? Connect with us @vapartners and share your suggestions with us.

Website Audit Tools for Speed, Mobile-Friendliness and Links