Drupal site audit is the most effective way to check Drupal performance and scalability including your resource for various problems that prevent users from interacting normally with the site and hinder the development of your business.
By performing such an audit, you will be able to increase your traffic and performance, as well as more effectively implement all the goals of your project.
For more information about Drupal performance and scalability as well as the benefits of Drupal site audit and who can be trusted with such work, read our article.
Drupal performance and scalability: Benefits of Drupal Site Audit
1. Navigation
Since you are a business owner, you probably do not have problems with navigation on your web resource.
This means that you may not notice the problems that users may encounter.
These include:
- Your potential customers have to do too many clicks to get to the page they want.
- Every page of your site should have a clear way back to the home page.
- The absence of an information retrieval function also complicates interaction with the resource.
- Broken links.
- Too much information and elements on the main page can annoy and tire your users. Keep everything to a minimum.
- No social media buttons, your address, email, or phone number.
- Absence of necessary buttons, which should logically be in a particular section (buttons «Buy», «Contact», «Subscribe», etc.).
We have listed the most common problems, but in fact, there are many more.
Testing your resource is a good way to check its navigation and make sure it is optimized for users and search robots.
2. Speed
The company executing the Drupal site audit should also check the page loading speed and response speed.
The normal page loading speed is faster than 1 second.
The average speed is 2-3 seconds, and the slow speed is over 4 seconds.
If there are any delays during the audit, your developer should identify the primary cause and fix it.
Sometimes speed drop can be due to the fact that the site does not work on the latest version of Drupal.
In this case, we recommend that you migrate to the latest, 10th version of this content management system.
It cannot be further delayed – previous versions will be considered obsolete in November 2023.
Alternatively, another reason for speed problems may be that you have caching disabled.
Of course, there are more difficult tasks, for example, the presence of unnecessary modules that load the system and need to be disabled.
Page speed auditing tools: Google pagespeed insights, Pingdom, Dareboost, GTmetrix and Google analytics site speed.
3. Code and safety
Perhaps this is a key factor for such an audit.
All web resources keep some information about their users.
It is very important to make sure that intruders will not be able to hack your site and that this data will remain safe.
By performing the audit, you will identify all vulnerabilities of your resource, ensure its stable operation, and eliminate possible risks.
For testing, you can use Burp suite, Nessus, OWASP Testing Guide, Rapid7, etc.
4. Performance
Performance testing is one of the key components of auditing, as it helps to identify how your web resource behaves in various situations (for example, at a peak load – when a large number of users logged in to your site at the same time).
The main performance elements that affect the response time of the website are the number of JS and CSS, the size of the CSS, the size of the page, image, etc.
5. General functionality
The task of the audit is to check the site performance: whether certain functions, modules, links and tools work correctly.
It identifies anything that does not work, is out of date, or is missing so that you can make all necessary adjustments.
6. Mobile usability
Most users buy or search the Internet with their smartphones.
That is why it is so important to make their interaction with the site as comfortable as possible.
This includes adaptive design, as well as the presence of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages that are very quickly downloaded and very convenient to view on mobile devices.
Google Resizer, Screenfly, Crossbrowser Testing, Browserstack, and Ghostlab are common tools for such testing.
7. SEO
SEO audit is one of the most important stages of testing.
It identifies and analyzes major issues that negatively affect the effectiveness of your organic search.
These include:
- Indexing
- Keywords
- Optimized URL
- Header optimization
- Call to action
- Meta-description
- Internal links
- Schema markup
- Image optimization, etc.
Based on the data received, you will be able to understand how productive your SEO is and what you need to do to improve it.
You will need the following tools: Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, SEMrush, etc.
8. Hosting Infrastructure
Websites that use free or low-cost hosting often face downtime issues, low page speeds, and low bandwidth.
To avoid this, we recommend changing your hosting and performing an audit that will point to the most obvious problems of your web resource.
9. Accessibility
Modern resources should be user-friendly for all categories of users.
An accessibility audit will show how well your website meets the needs of people with disabilities.
To do this, you need to check the size of the header, sound operation, and navigation when working only with the keyboard, magnifying glass, etc.
For this purpose, you can use Google Lighthouse, Wave Evolution tool, and Stark contrast checker.
10. Competitor analysis
Want users to choose your brand?
Analysis of competitors will help to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your business, to find out who your competitors are, how they are progressing, what promotion tools they use, etc.
All this will allow you to learn about the most common bugs in your sphere and help eliminate them on your own website.
11. Content
Users come to us not only for the product.
They also come for quality and useful content.
That is why it is so important to know which materials are the most popular, and which ones are outdated.
To do this, consider the relevance of the texts, the way they are presented, the absence of errors and broken links, the number of occurrences of keywords, formatting, image quality, etc.
12. Marketing audit
With the help of this audit, you will be able to identify how well the unique trade offer is written, identify the presence of calls for action and the degree of their effectiveness, and check the positioning of the brand in the network.
13. Conversion
High conversion is the dream of every business owner.
It indicates how effective your landing pages and advertising are.
Conversion can be affected by the quality of your advertising, usability, internal optimization, etc.
By performing the analysis, you will clearly understand what reduces conversion and how to increase the number of visitors to your resource who have done the target action (buying goods, subscribing to the mailing list, clicking on the link, etc.).
14. Withdrawing from under Search Engine Filters
Many business owners have faced the fact that their site was under a filter and sanctions.
With this testing, you will be able to see if it has happened to your resource.
If sanctions have taken place, testing will reveal reasons and ways to help you get back to your previous positions in the search engine.
15. Control
Also, with the help of the audit, you will be able to check how conscientiously the specialists perform their tasks.
Wrap up
Apart from Drupal performance and scalability, now you know why you need a Drupal site audit and how it is performed.
Among all companies providing such services, we recommend the digital agency Drupfan.
The company has long worked in this field and tries to find a unique solution for each business.
Drupfan experts know all the nuances of such testing, as well as are ready to implement the necessary changes that will help to improve the efficiency of the site and increase your profit.
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