Monthly Site Audits

CONTITIONING
After a successful launch of a website, what do you suppose is the first thing you need to setup on your calendar? Reminders, and lots of them! Billing is definitely one of them. Content creation is another. Written blog articles, social media posts, downloadable content such as pictures, videos, and other various files. All of this needs to be published on a weekly or monthly basis for your business to thrive. Let’s treat your site like a car, let’s not forget, it requires that monthly or quarterly oil change, mechanical check-up, windshield wiper fluid tap up. There’s also the usual tire alignments, balancing, tire rotations, seasonal tires, or simply adding air to the tires. All these things in the end, will effect it’s performance.

VALIDATION TOOLS
Over the years, I have worked at various places that utilized tools to validate site performances, both internally and externally. I will cover the external ones first since they are free and easy to use, but I will also provide a few internal WordPress plugin based tools and paid versions. My go to list are as follows:

FREE TOOLS
Yellow Lab Tools
GTmetrix
Dareboost
Google Lighthouse

PREMIUM TOOLS
WP Rocket
WP Optimize
Smush
ImageOptim
TinyPNG
JPG to SVG Converter by Convertio

The free tools are usually the first thing I try when tasked with a checking a site’s performance. Once you have collected the data from all the sites, I usually do a personal cross check to see what comes up as a common issue.

CLEANING UP
Alright, so you have entered your URL into their site input field and you have been given a score. Most of the time, the site is bogged down from large culprits such as oversized images, and videos. Sometimes your code could be the leading cause. Your CSS or JavaScript might not be minified. Maybe you are running far too may scripts that do little to nothing for your site. Or perhaps there are too many unnecessary calls being made to the server.

Now, what about those images and videos? They do add pizzazz to your site, but they also slow things down if you don’t compress them enough. There are outside sources that can do that compression job for you. Such examples of conversions like PNG to SVG. How about the video files being converted from H.264 to WebM? The alternative for videos is also hosted it through an third-party source such as Vimeo. Course, now you’re relying on their end. If they go down, your site is hosed. If you work with a team of people, typically you should verify the image quality with a designer first. Later, see if they have any image and video compression ideas. See if they are familiar with any applications within their wheel house.

SCHEDULE IT!
Site auditing does seem like a mundane task, but vital to a sites overall performance. If your site relies heavily on images such as a photography site, art gallery site, or e-commerce site, you will want to think about adding the task to your calendar at the end of every month. In the long run you’ll have efficient files and data to work with that can grow with your site if it ever needs expansion whether within WordPress or some other platform.

This was initially published on my site at jameslau.com (https://jameslau.com/monthly-site-audits/). Please come by and check out more of my writing and other works!

Thanks for reading!