What is a WordPress website review?.

A website review evaluates a website’s performance, design, user experience, and overall effectiveness.

A WordPress website review aims to identify any issues or opportunities for improvement and provide recommendations for how to address them.

When conducting a website review, there are several key areas to focus on:

1. Design and layout
2. User experience
3. Content
4. Functionality
5. Search engine optimization
6. Analytics
7. Accessibility
8. Security
9. Branding
10. Social media integration

Design and layout.

The first thing users will notice about your website is its design and layout. A well-designed website should be visually appealing, easy to navigate, and consistent in its branding and messaging.

It should look professional and appropriate for your vertical. If it doesn’t, this can confuse visitors and bounce them back to the search engines.

Design is subjective. It’s best to follow best-practice and not get overly emotionally attached to the design of your site. In reality, it could be designed in 1000 different ways and still be effective.

Temper your personal preferences against those of your audience and your niche.

User experience.

A good website should be easy for users to interact with and understand. This includes intuitive navigation, clear and concise information, and a responsive design that works well on different devices.

There is a lot written about UX, but you need at least 5000 visitors per month to get meaningful data from A/B testing.

Again, the best practice wins here; looking at what the bigger sites are doing will give you insight into your own UX.

Content.

The content of your website should be high-quality, unique, and informative. It should be easy to read, understand, and optimized for both search engines and users.

Content is the most important thing on any website. As a ranking factor, it is the number one thing to get right. You can have the best-designed, fastest site out there, but if your content is not insightful and helpful, you will not rank where you want to be.

Functionality.

A website review should also assess the website’s functionality, such as page load times, broken links, and form submissions.

Nothing slows a WordPress site down more than too many plugins, overly complex themes and poorly thought-out functionality.

If you have a large site that’s slow and built using a page builder or some complex theme, you might want to consider a rebuild on a lightweight bespoke theme.

Search engine optimization.

A website review should also include an assessment of the website’s SEO. This includes keyword optimization, meta tags, backlinks, and mobile optimization.

These are the basics of SEO and what we cover in a WordPress review.

Analytics.

Website analytics can provide a wealth of information about how users interact with your website.

By analyzing data such as traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates, you can identify areas for improvement.

Analytics is also very complicated, so you may need to invest time in exploring the data provided.

Accessibility.

Website accessibility is essential for ensuring that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and navigate your website.

This also takes in things like the colours and layout of your website. We often come across corporate guidelines where the designers did not check the contrast values of the colours.

Be prepared to tweak code, layout and colour to make your site more accessible.

Security.

A website review should also assess the website’s security, including the use of HTTPS and the presence of any vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.

SSL certificates are pretty standard these days, but you can easily get mixed content errors if your site has not set up the URL structure correctly.

Get this wrong, and Chrome (et al.) will display a warning to potential visitors.

Branding.

A website review should also assess how well the website represents the business’s brand, including the use of consistent branding throughout the website and appropriate imagery and messaging.

You need to look the same everywhere, from your brochures to your social accounts and your website.

Social media integration.

A website review should also assess how well the website is integrated with social media platforms, such as the presence of social sharing buttons and social media feeds.

Doing this correctly can encourage shares, like and other social signals that can influence your rankings.

Consideration should be given to where your market is: if your customers don’t use twitter, for example, it can be a waste of resources to maintain and manage that particular channel.