WordPress Site Audit: from a Developers perspective

The first step any digital marketing agency takes while on-boarding a new client for marketing is to perform a SEO site audit. This is a very important and crucial practice followed by digital marketers to see the current state of the site and how much efforts they would need to put into the website to generate better resutls from all their marketing activities moving forward.

This is a very good practice and if followed by the development team, they could fix many of their problems and challenges for mananging an existing prebuilt site from their clients. Usually when a client comes with an existing pre-built site to the development team for enhancement and customization requests, many developers would jump right into working on the site to implement features and fix the problems. And once a developer starts any work on the website, even though if it’s just a content change, he or she is now solely responsible for any issues or problems with the website. This is one of the reason why many developers hate taking work on an existing and pre-built site not because they won’t be able to do it but because of the blame that is put on them for the work they never did and was received from the previous development team.

Developers can handle these situations with an existing pre-built sites more confidently if they follow the same practices as the marketing team. Always prepare a DEVELOPMENT SITE AUDIT when taking over an existing pre-built website of a client to work on. There are tons of templates available in the market for SEO site audit but hardly any for the DEVELOPMENT site audit. In this article, I would be provide a list of items to be considered while performing a DEVELOPMENT site audit for an existing pre-built site.

Key Elements to Include in a Development Site Audit:

Theme Review:

• Active theme: Verify if the active theme is a custom built theme or a pre-built template used from a market place. Key elements to consider while reviewing a theme are:
• Child theme: Verify if the site is using a child theme for customizations of a premium or readymade theme.
• Review the Theme Files: Examine the theme’s files, including PHP, CSS, and JavaScript, to evaluate their structure, organization, and readability.
• Proper File Structure: Verify if the theme files are organized in a logical manner, with clear separation of concerns (e.g., separating template files, functions, styles).
• Theme Options: Check if the theme provides a user-friendly interface for configuring settings and options.
• Widget Areas: Evaluate if the theme includes widget areas for flexible content placement.
• Navigation/Menus: Ensure that the theme supports WordPress navigation menus and properly implements them.
• Theme Documentation: Assess the availability and quality of documentation provided by the theme author, including installation instructions, configuration details, and troubleshooting guides.
• Theme updates: Check if any theme updates are available and pending to be performed.

Plugin Review

• Active plugins: Review the list of active plugins and try to identify the purpose it serves on the site.
• Plugin Updates: Check if all the plugins used on site are regularly updated by the author to address security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues.
• Vulnerability History: Research any known security vulnerabilities or incidents associated with the plugin.
• Unwanted or duplicate plugins: Check if there are any plugins that can compromise the security of the site or serves the same purpose that can be fulfilled by an existing pluing on the site.
• Check updates: Check if any plugin updates are available and pending to be performed.

Coding Standards and Best Practices

• Proper Use of Functions and Hooks: Assess if the theme uses appropriate WordPress functions and hooks to extend core functionality and modify output.
• Custom Post Types and Taxonomies: Check if the theme properly registers and displays custom post types and taxonomies.
• Page Templates: Verify the templates built into the theme for different purposes (e.g., archive pages, contact page).
• Code Implementation: Review theme customizer and theme options page to make sure all the CSS and functions are implemented at one common space rather than at multiple different areas.

Responsive Design and Cross-Browser Compatibility

• Responsive Design: Test the theme on different devices and screen sizes to verify its responsiveness.
• Cross-Browser Compatibility: Check if the theme functions properly and appears consistent across major web browsers (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge).

Performance

• Page Load Speed: Test the theme’s performance using tools like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to ensure it doesn’t introduce unnecessary overhead.
• Asset Optimization: Check if the theme optimizes CSS and JavaScript files, minimizing their size and combining them where possible.
• Image Optimization: Evaluate if the theme includes image optimization techniques (e.g., lazy loading, responsive image sizes) to improve performance.

Website Security

• Latest WordPress Version: Ensure that the WordPress core is up to date with the latest stable release.
• Unused User Accounts: Identify and list any inactive or unnecessary user accounts that should be deleted.
• Unused Themes and Plugins: List any unused themes and plugins to minimize potential security risks and should be removed.
• Security Plugin Installation: Evaluate the use of security plugins such as Wordfence, Sucuri, or iThemes Security.
• Configuration Settings: Assess the proper configuration of security plugins for enhanced protection.
• Malware Scanning: Verify if regular malware scans are performed to detect and remove any malicious code or files.
• SSL Certificate: Ensure that an SSL certificate is installed and the website is accessible over HTTPS.
• Regular Backups: Ensure that backups of the website’s files and database are performed regularly.
• Error Logging: Enable error logging to identify and address potential security vulnerabilities.
• Security Vulnerability Assessment: Conduct vulnerability scans using tools like WPScan or Sucuri SiteCheck to identify any known vulnerabilities.

SEO Considerations (Optional)

• Permalinks: Make sure the permalinks are setup correctly.
• Indexing: Make sure that the site indexing is working and right pages are set to index.
• Sitemap.xml: Verify the sitemap.xml.

Current issues:

• Discuss the challenges or issues client had or still faces with the existing site while performing updates or on a regular basis.

Recommendations:

• At last, you should provide all the necessary recommendations to improve the overall structure and development standards of the website.

You can take help from other team members such as a QA as well as Frontend developer to perform few audits from the above list. Once this audit report is generated, it is very likely that you would have a clear and better understanding of the website and the challenges it comes with. Also, with this audit shared with the client, they would have a confidence in you as you have fully understood the site and already highlighted key areas of the site that could be troublesome in future and has opportunity of improvements.

With this said, now if you have any challenges on the site and it takes a little longer than usual to perform certain tasks, clients would understand the complexity because of the nature of the website and would not blame you for all the issues on the website.