Essential WordPress Audit Checklist for Success

When it comes to managing your WordPress website, conducting a comprehensive WordPress Audit Checklist is crucial for ensuring optimal performance and security. This audit will provide useful information on the condition of your website, allowing you to identify areas that need attention or maintenance. In this post, we will delve deep into various aspects of a thorough WordPress Audit Checklist, covering essential topics. By following our detailed guidance on each aspect of the checklist mentioned above in this blog post; you’ll be well-equipped to maintain your site’s overall health while enhancing its usability and search engine visibility. Stay tuned as we explore these critical components of an effective WordPress Audit Checklist.

Why you need a WordPress audit

To ensure that your WordPress website is running smoothly and delivering the best possible results for your business, it’s important to conduct a thorough audit. This involves assessing various key criteria such as performance, security and functionality. By identifying areas for improvement, you can optimise your site and enhance its overall effectiveness. Our comprehensive guide to WordPress optimization covers all aspects of this process in detail, but in this article we’ll focus specifically on what you should be looking out for when conducting a WordPress website audit.

WordPress website audit checklist

1. Check software & plugin versions

Regular updates are crucial for WordPress and any plugins or themes you use. These updates fix bugs, address security issues, and maintain performance. Therefore, the first task on our WordPress audit checklist is to check and update your software version. To determine whether you have the latest version of WordPress, navigate to ‘Updates’ in the left-hand menu of your dashboard. This page also displays information about plugin and theme updates. Updating to the most recent versions of WordPress and its plugins is a straightforward process. Just click on the relevant ‘update’ button(s). However, it’s always a good idea to back up your site beforehand in case anything goes wrong!

2. Check site speed

The speed of a website is crucial for its performance, as it directly affects user experience and conversion rates. Moreover, search engine rankings are also influenced by the speed of a site, with slower ones being penalized and receiving lower visibility on search results pages.

You can check the speed of your WordPress website using Google PageSpeed. To ensure optimal performance of your WordPress website, it is important to check its scores for desktop and mobile. The scores range from 0 to 100, with a target score above 90. If you want to improve the speed of your website, visit our blog where we provide numerous tips on how to do so.

3. Check blogs & content

Regularly adding fresh content to your website is a great way to show both search engines and visitors that your site is active, engaging, and worth exploring. To keep track of when you last published a blog post or if any upcoming articles are scheduled, head over to the ‘Posts’ section in your WordPress dashboard. The frequency at which you should publish new content depends on your goals and available resources. You may opt for daily, weekly, or monthly posts. Regardless of how often you publish new content, it’s essential to have a well-planned content strategy in place and schedule posts ahead of time. Reviewing your latest blogs and content plan should be part of your regular WordPress audit. Additionally, monitoring comments on your site is crucial. WordPress automatically holds comments for moderation before they’re posted publicly. Check the ‘Comments’ section in your dashboard regularly to approve or delete pending comments as needed.

4. Check WordPress security

Regularly scanning your WordPress site for malware, viruses and suspicious code is crucial to avoid potential financial losses and reputational damage caused by a hacked or infected website. To ensure the security of your site, we recommend installing the Wordfence plugin which provides website security hardening, a firewall to block malicious traffic and a scanner that detects malware. To scan your site for any security issues, navigate to Wordfence > Scan and click on ‘Start new scan’. If there are any problems detected during the scan, Wordfence will provide recommendations on how to fix them and secure your site once again. 

5. Check for broken links

When a hyperlink leads to a webpage that is not functional, it is known as a broken link. This can be an annoyance for visitors who will encounter an error message and may decide to leave your site. Additionally, search engines view broken links unfavorably, which can have negative consequences for your website’s ranking.

You should check regularly for broken links with an online tool such as Dr Link Check. To maintain the quality of your website, it’s important to regularly check for broken links and fix them. You can start by using a tool to scan your site for any broken links. Once you have identified them, visit the relevant pages and update or remove the link as necessary. It is advisable to perform this maintenance task every few months or more frequently if you publish a lot of content on your website. You may find installing the WordPress Redirection plugin helpful, so you can set up redirects for any old/changed URLs.

Having a friendly 404 error page is essential to maintain user satisfaction when they come across a broken link on your website. If you haven’t already created one, the 404-page plugin can help you generate a custom 404 page for your WordPress site.

6. Check the functionality

As part of your WordPress audit, it is important to assess the design and functionality of your website. This can be accomplished by thoroughly examining your site and testing any interactive elements like buttons or contact forms. By conducting this type of review, you can identify potential problems with coding, formatting, design, or operation that require further investigation and resolution.

7. Review analytics

To keep track of your website’s performance, you can make use of a Google Analytics plugin like MonsterInsights. This plugin allows you to easily view your site data by going to Insights > Reports in the WordPress back-end. As part of your website audit, it is important to review your analytics and analyze what aspects are functioning well and which ones need improvement. For instance, you should determine which pages on your site are receiving the most traffic and which aren’t getting as much attention. With this information at hand, you can then implement changes on your WordPress website based on data analysis to enhance its overall performance.

8. Check SEO performance

As a part of your WordPress audit, it is recommended to conduct an SEO health check for your website. This can be done easily using free online tools like Ubersuggest SEO analyzer or similar ones. Enter your website URL, choose the language and country, and click on ‘Search’. The tool will generate a report that displays important metrics such as organic traffic levels, domain score, and number of organic keywords associated with your site. It’s advisable to record these metrics as part of the audit process and work towards improving them over time. To get a more detailed analysis of your site’s SEO health status, navigate to the ‘Site Audit’ section in the left-hand menu on Ubersuggest. Here you’ll find a comprehensive list of issues that require attention such as pages with low word-counts or poorly-formatted URLs. Addressing these issues can significantly improve your website’s search engine rankings and overall performance.

9. Check mobile compatibility

To ensure that your WordPress website is functioning well on various screen sizes and devices, you can perform two tests – the Responsive Test and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. These tests provide valuable information about how your site appears on smaller screens and whether it meets the requirements of mobile browsers. By using these tests, you can optimize your site for a better user experience across all devices.

10. Check your database

The more you update your site, the more your database becomes clogged-up with old content, deleted comments, unused plugins and more. It’s therefore worth looking through your database to see what is there and check for surplus items as part of your WordPress audit.

To keep your database tidy, you can schedule automatic database clean-ups with a plugin such as WP-Sweep. It’s also a good idea to go through your plugins regularly (in ‘Plugins’ on theWordPress dashboard) and delete any that are no longer needed.

11. Check backups

Regularly backing up your website is crucial to ensure that you can quickly restore it in case of a security breach, ransomware attack or any other major issue. As part of your website audit, it’s important to verify the backup process and ensure that all relevant data is being securely stored in different locations without any corruption. Additionally, check if backups are scheduled frequently enough to minimize data loss and during low traffic periods to avoid impacting site speed and user experience. By doing so, you can increase the chances of restoring your site efficiently when needed. WordPress agencies or hosting providers usually offer site backups as part of their services. However, you can also handle backups yourself by using a backup plugin like BackupBuddy.

12. Check user accounts & passwords

As part of your WordPress site audit, it’s important to review the different types of users added to your site and their corresponding permissions. This is crucial in ensuring that user profiles don’t pose any security risks. To do this, navigate to the ‘Users’ section on your WordPress dashboard and check if each user has only been given the necessary level of access. Additionally, updating passwords for all users is also recommended during an audit. It’s best practice to choose strong passwords with a random combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Don’t forget to keep track of these updated passwords as well!

13. Check accessibility

It is crucial to ensure that your website is accessible to everyone, especially since one in five people have a long-term disability. The law in the UK requires services, including websites, to be accessible to all individuals. Therefore, it is recommended that you conduct an audit of your website’s accessibility using tools like Wave or other similar ones. If there are any issues with accessibility on your site, seek advice from your WordPress agency on how to make improvements.

14. Review admin tasks

In addition to the regular website maintenance tasks, your audit should also cover the occasional administrative duties involved in managing a website. It is recommended that you review and assess these less frequent tasks, such as:

Domain renewal: It is important to include domain name renewal in your website audit checklist as most websites require it on a regular basis. You can renew your domain directly with the provider or through your WordPress support agency. Make sure you don’t overlook this crucial step in maintaining your website’s online presence.

Disaster recovery: It is important to have a disaster recovery plan that outlines the necessary steps to take in case of a website crash or security breach. Your plan should be regularly reviewed and updated with current legal requirements, website information, and organizational protocols.

Hosting provider: To ensure that your hosting needs are being met, it is recommended to assess your current hosting provider’s performance on factors such as speed, security, reliability, hosting type and cost. It is important to note that most hosting packages renew annually.

SSL certificate: To ensure the security of your website, it is necessary to renew your SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate every two years. You can accomplish this by contacting your hosting provider or using Let’s Encrypt.

Conclusion

To ensure your website is secure and functioning optimally, make sure to assess the consistency of design and functionality, evaluate content relevancy and engagement, optimize SEO features, keep databases safe and backed up regularly.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to take action on securing your website. Use this WordPress Audit Checklist as a guide to keep track of all the important steps necessary for maintaining the health of your website.

If you need help with any aspect of auditing or improving your WordPress site’s performance or security measures, contact Amadeus Consulting today!