Auditing a website – The fundamentals for analyzing your site or your competitors
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2025 8:15 am
Whether it is to assess the level of web maturity of a competitor or your own site, auditing a website is an important exercise for a project leader. It is therefore important to adopt an appropriate methodology if you want to get the most information from it. By asking the right questions, and thanks to a few very practical tools, it is possible to analyze the overall quality of a website in a minimum of time. La Fabrique du Net offers you an evaluation grid and a selection of tools to help you easily audit any website.
Summary
Web audit – Analyze navigation
The goal here is to assess the website's ability to guide a visitor to the pages that meet their needs.
Web Audit of Navigation – Navigation Menu
The vast majority of websites have a menu placed at the top of the page that allows access to the main sections of the site. All Internet users are obviously used to using the menu to navigate, but also to benin whatsapp lead understand the value proposition of the website. More and more websites, particularly e-commerce sites, are choosing a level 2 menu that takes up a lot of space, in order to present numerous subcategories and thematic promotions. The objective is always the same, to ensure that the Internet user arrives as quickly as possible on a page adapted to their needs. To go further on the subject, I recommend this analysis of 26 e-commerce menus.
Key questions for analyzing a website menu
For 3 typical use cases, does the menu allow access to the desired section?
Are the menu headings easy to read? And understand?
If the website has a second level of navigation, are the level 2 elements clearly structured?
Some examples of e-commerce menus
Fnac.com – Classic and efficient two-level menu
Fnac.com Menu
B&Q – Menu in 2014
Ecommerce menu - B&Q - 2011
B&Q – Menu in 2021
Web Audit of Navigation – Internal Search Engine
The internal search engine of a website is an increasingly important navigation device. Internet users are bottle-fed on Google search, and more and more websites are integrating an internal search engine. According to a recent study carried out by Sensefuel, in France 74% of visitors to an e-commerce site will perform a search from the internal engine on a computer, and only 67% will use the search bar from a mobile device. (see source: Ecommerce Mag ). Large e-retailers are increasingly promoting the search engine in their interfaces, as evidenced by the new version of Cdiscount which displays the search engine in the top bar after a scroll. In terms of internal search engines, there are many good practices and areas of work to improve performance: search tracking (see example via Google Analytics ), auto-completion, related searches, searchandising , etc. Be careful not to forget the most important thing, there is no point in setting up an internal search engine if the results are not relevant. The quality of the results depends on the technology used (Elastic Search, Apache Solr, etc.) but it mainly depends on the data in the catalog, and this is often where the problem lies.
Summary
Web audit – Analyze navigation
The goal here is to assess the website's ability to guide a visitor to the pages that meet their needs.
Web Audit of Navigation – Navigation Menu
The vast majority of websites have a menu placed at the top of the page that allows access to the main sections of the site. All Internet users are obviously used to using the menu to navigate, but also to benin whatsapp lead understand the value proposition of the website. More and more websites, particularly e-commerce sites, are choosing a level 2 menu that takes up a lot of space, in order to present numerous subcategories and thematic promotions. The objective is always the same, to ensure that the Internet user arrives as quickly as possible on a page adapted to their needs. To go further on the subject, I recommend this analysis of 26 e-commerce menus.
Key questions for analyzing a website menu
For 3 typical use cases, does the menu allow access to the desired section?
Are the menu headings easy to read? And understand?
If the website has a second level of navigation, are the level 2 elements clearly structured?
Some examples of e-commerce menus
Fnac.com – Classic and efficient two-level menu
Fnac.com Menu
B&Q – Menu in 2014
Ecommerce menu - B&Q - 2011
B&Q – Menu in 2021
Web Audit of Navigation – Internal Search Engine
The internal search engine of a website is an increasingly important navigation device. Internet users are bottle-fed on Google search, and more and more websites are integrating an internal search engine. According to a recent study carried out by Sensefuel, in France 74% of visitors to an e-commerce site will perform a search from the internal engine on a computer, and only 67% will use the search bar from a mobile device. (see source: Ecommerce Mag ). Large e-retailers are increasingly promoting the search engine in their interfaces, as evidenced by the new version of Cdiscount which displays the search engine in the top bar after a scroll. In terms of internal search engines, there are many good practices and areas of work to improve performance: search tracking (see example via Google Analytics ), auto-completion, related searches, searchandising , etc. Be careful not to forget the most important thing, there is no point in setting up an internal search engine if the results are not relevant. The quality of the results depends on the technology used (Elastic Search, Apache Solr, etc.) but it mainly depends on the data in the catalog, and this is often where the problem lies.