Why you should do a design audit of your website
In order to keep your website fresh, interesting and engaging for visitors, a design audit should be carried out on a regular basis. The content, graphics and layout of your website all have an impact on your customer’s website experience and influences the conversion rate and SEO ranking of your site. So let’s jump into some of the reasons you should do a design audit on your website.
Creating a strong brand image
Consistency across all media is vital to creating a strong brand image. Doing a design audit on your website will help you determine and pinpoint areas of design that may be inconsistent, giving you the opportunity to change your brand image by creating consistency across the board. Your logo, graphics and call-to-action icons should be standard and recognisable throughout your digital marketing. Within your website ensure consistency flows across all your pages thereby creating a strong brand image.
Useability within the site
Checking the usability of your website is another feature of a design audit. Simply checking that the links, whether internal or external, still work well and are unbroken is important to ensuring that a visitor’s experience on your site is the best it can be. Is your online order form user friendly? If it’s more conversion rates that you’re after, then the online order form needs to be easy to read and use. Is your website optimised for mobile devices? There are tools, for example, Google Search Console, that can be used to help you.
Design system
Having a design system will enable you to use the same elements throughout your website and across other platforms. Your design system may include rules and instructions for content, visuals, components, patterns and buttons. The tone and message that you convey in your website is also part of your brand. By doing the design audit of your website you will be able to check if the design system you created initially has been applied throughout the website.
Being consistent
Keeping the design consistent across your website helps to build trust with your audience. As your business grows and you add different elements, the look, feel and design still needs to fit within your branding pattern. By doing a design audit you will be ensuring that as time passes the branding remains consistent.
Audit checklist
It would be advisable to create a design audit checklist for your website before starting with the audit. You will need a clear idea of what the brand direction is. A few components to check for on all your pages in your website:
- Have you used the same background styles on all pages?
- Is your logo the same across the board?
- Is typography consistent?
- Are the pages mobile friendly?
There are many more to consider when doing your design audit on your website.
Tone and message
A surefire way to keep your viewers engaged and interested in your site is by ensuring that the voice, tone and message you convey across all your pages are considered. The message you convey may evolve over time and every bit of text will need to be analysed to ensure that the tone remains the same throughout. If you are unhappy with it, you may need to rewrite all the text to create the correct tone and message you are wanting to convey.
Website performance
The importance of pages loading quickly is essential to keeping users on your site. Sluggish websites are frustrating and users will lose interest. Therefore, one of the important parts of the design audit of your website should be gauging the speed and responsiveness of all pages.
More conversions
By analysing and doing a design audit on your website, you will find that users will enjoy a better experience. You will increase the chance of conversions by ensuring that the order forms and the purchase process is easy to use and flows well.
A user-focused website should always be the desired end result of the design audit. The end result will give you an idea of where you have gone wrong and a chance to correct it. Using the expertise of Digital Noir will greatly improve your website design, bringing it in line with what your brand is all about.