website technical audit

Website Technical Audit Tool: Optimize your Website (Advanced Users)

This free technical SEO audit tool from Bruce Clay helps you identify technical issues in your domain and gives you insightful tips to help enhance your site’s overall performance in just a few seconds. By conducting this technical SEO audit, you will be able to understand if your website is technically sound and if there are any steps you need to take to ensure that. The tool detects any issues that can affect your site’s search engine indexation, rankings, user experience, and gives you clear instructions on how to fix them.

Some of the areas that could be an issue that the tool highlights are render-blocking resources, server response times (TTFB), inefficient methods for delivering animated content, third-party usage that can impact load performance and poorly applied redirects which introduce additional delays to loading time.

What Metrics Does the Technical SEO Audit Explore?

One of the most essential responsibilities of technical audit tools is to identify any issues that affect user experience. Some of the tool’s metrics that serve this purpose are speed index which shows how soon the contents of a page are visibly populated, time to interactive which measures the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive and detecting if there’s an efficient cache policy that can help speed up repeat visits to your page. All these metrics ensure that your site’s visitors have a satisfactory experience to avoid increased bounce-rate and return-to-SERP rate.

The tool also measures when the primary content of a page is visible, known as the time for the First Meaningful Paint. It runs a tech audit using advanced technologies to uncover other technical aspects like request counts and transfer sizes, network requests that were made during page load and multiple page redirects. By thoroughly crawling your whole site, the tool is able to list the network requests that were made during page load. Another important factor that this technical audit tool helps you monitor is third-party usage which can directly impact site speed and load performance. Redundant third-party code should be limited on your site and allowed to load only after your page loads.

Why are Technical SEO Audits so Important for Your Website?

Technical aspects or back-end factors such as hosting, indexing, page load speed and redirects can significantly affect your SEO performance. Most technical issues will directly affect site speed which in turn can affect bounce rate, time on page and other key ranking metrics that search engines use.

The technical audit tool will help determine if the implementation of your website is in any way decreasing your site’s organic search traffic and helps you fix those implementation issues that were uncovered. Once the audit is complete, the tool will also provide clear and easy to follow recommendations. Check all the links in each box below for additional resources that will help you understand more about the technical issues that were flagged in your site’s tech audit.