A website isn’t just a marketing asset; it's a performance machine. A website audit serves as a health check for your online presence: By reviewing your website’s performance, you can confirm it is well-configured to meet high company and customer expectations.

From SEO to accessibility, security to performance, a detailed website audit helps you identify bottlenecks, resolve issues, and drive growth.

In this blog, we walk you through the essentials of conducting a website audit, covering SEO, performance, accessibility, and security. You'll also discover how Drupal-specific tools, such as DrupalFit, streamline the entire auditing process for improved accuracy and efficiency. You can also audit your website to assess its current standing.

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To truly unlock your website’s potential, let’s start by understanding what a website audit involves!

What is a Website Audit?

A website audit involves a thorough assessment of all essential components of your website, covering areas such as performance, SEO, user experience, and security to guarantee it is optimized for both users and search engines.

It aids in pinpointing problems, revealing areas for enhancement, and aligning your website with business objectives. By analyzing factors like page speed, mobile adaptability, content quality, and technical architecture, a website audit ensures that your site not only operates efficiently but also maintains a competitive edge.

Many people assume that once a website is launched, there’s little need for continuous evaluation. However, that’s a misconception. Periodic audits help track evolving performance issues and user expectations.

That said, conducting a web audit does not guarantee that you will uncover problems with your site. You might perform a thorough website audit and find that everything is functioning correctly. 

If this is the case, that is excellent!

Conversely, if you discover any issues, you can address them before they negatively affect your web traffic. This is why understanding how to perform a website audit is crucial.

Also Check Out:

1. DrupalFit: Your One-Stop Solution for Security, Accessibility & Performance

2. Full-Spectrum Site Analysis: Where SEO, Performance, Security & Accessibility Converge

3. Technical SEO Excellence: Boost Visibility with Smart Audits Using DrupalFit

What are the Types of Website Audits?

If you decide it's time to perform a website audit, it's best to identify the exact type of audit you want to do. Numerous options exist, and you will likely execute all of them at various intervals.

Search Engine Optimization

An SEO audit is a specialized website evaluation focused on improving your site's visibility in search engine results.

It examines key SEO elements like keyword performance, backlink quality, on-page optimization (meta tags, alt tags, canonicals), and off-page signals. By analysing these components, an SEO audit helps uncover issues that may be holding your rankings back, such as poor keyword targeting, broken links, or weak backlink profiles.

A well-executed audit also looks at the authority and relevance of sites linking to yours, ensuring that your backlink strategy is contributing positively to your domain's equity (“link juice”) and not harming it.

DrupalFit makes it easy to perform these checks, identifying missing optimization data in minutes and offering actionable fixes.

Ultimately, an SEO audit ensures your website is not just live but discoverable, competitive, and fully aligned with your organic growth goals.

Accessibility

An accessibility audit makes sure your website is usable by all, including those with disabilities. It evaluates how easily users can navigate and interact with your content using assistive technologies like screen readers, keyboard navigation, or voice controls.

This type of audit checks for compliance with standards like WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and ensures compatibility across different browsers and devices.

Web accessibility ensures that your site is inclusive for users with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments, which not only improves user experience and expands your audience but also strengthens your brand’s reputation and reduces legal risk.

To help organizations meet these expectations, DrupalFit performs automated checks across all three WCAG 2.1 compliance levels A, AA, and AAA. These checks help you assess how accessible your content really is and prioritize improvements based on impact and feasibility.

What DrupalFit Checks

DrupalFit examines the content and structure of your website to identify important accessibility problems that impact usability:

1. Color Contrast Analysis: Detects low-contrast text and interface elements that hinder readability.
2. Missing Alt Text: Flags images and media that lack descriptive alternative attributes.
3. Form Labeling & ARIA Landmarks: Ensures proper structure and context for screen readers.
4. Keyboard Navigation: Verifies that users can fully navigate your site without using a mouse.
5. Semantic HTML Usage: Encourages correct usage of HTML tags for headings, lists, and navigational elements, improving both accessibility and SEO.

WCAG 2.1 Compliance Levels

DrupalFit checks your site against three tiers of accessibility compliance, giving you flexibility to align with your audience's needs and legal obligations:

With DrupalFit, you get a segmented accessibility report that helps your team prioritize what to fix first based on legal risk, usability, and overall business impact.

By investing in accessibility audits and acting on their results, you ensure your Drupal site delivers a seamless, inclusive experience, making it easier for all users to access your content, engage with your brand, and convert.

Performance

A performance audit focuses on the technical structure and speed of your site, ensuring it operates efficiently and meets user expectations.

This includes conducting GAP analysis to identify missing functionalities or broken user journeys, and ROT analysis to eliminate redundant, outdated, or trivial elements that slow down the site or hinder SEO.

Through user intent mapping, you can align your site’s structure and metadata with search behavior, helping search engines interpret your content more effectively and improving crawl depth and internal linking strategy.

Additionally, content mapping from a technical standpoint involves organizing on-site elements (pages, links, redirects, sitemaps, and schema) to support better navigation, faster load times, and mobile responsiveness. This enhances both user experience and site discoverability.

A comprehensive technical audit helps surface issues like:

• Inefficient site architecture
• Orphaned pages or broken internal links
• Bloated code and unused scripts
• Poorly configured redirects or canonical tags

Addressing these gaps will boost technical performance, reduce crawl budget waste, and ensure your content is served efficiently to users and search engines alike.

Security

Maintaining your Drupal site’s security is essential to protect user data and preserve trust. Even a single breach can damage your brand’s reputation and customer confidence.

A Drupal security audit helps identify vulnerabilities such as outdated modules, weak configurations, or exposed entry points. By routinely evaluating your site, you can:

• Detect and fix security gaps
• Prevent data breaches
• Ensure compliance with Drupal best practices

DrupalFit leverages a combination of industry-standard scanners and Drupal-specific checks to give you comprehensive protection. This dual-layered approach ensures both your infrastructure and Drupal application layer are thoroughly assessed.

Scanners Used

DrupalFit combines and manages effective, reliable security scanners to examine your site infrastructure and application layer:

1. OWASP ZAP Passive Scan: Scans web traffic without sending active payloads—ideal for detecting security misconfigurations, headers, and cookies passively.
2. OWASP ZAP Active Scan: Sends test payloads to discover common vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL injection, and CSRF.
3. OpenVAS: An open-source vulnerability scanner that checks for known vulnerabilities (CVEs) across networked services and systems.
4. Nmap TCP Scan: Identifies open TCP ports and running services to detect exposed entry points or misconfigured services.
5. Nmap UDP Scan: Scans for UDP services that often fly under the radar but could pose serious risks if misconfigured (e.g., DNS, SNMP).
6. Sslyze TLS/SSL Audit: Evaluates SSL/TLS settings to confirm that encryption is robust, up-to-date, and meets compliance standards, identifying outdated protocols, weak ciphers, and absent security headers.

DrupalFit provides a centralized dashboard to view risks and prioritize them based on severity, helping you take swift and targeted action.

Tools like vulnerability scanners and patch monitoring allow us to identify risks and apply timely fixes. Prioritizing these issues keeps your site secure and your users confident.

At DrupalFit, we keep your website secure, updated, and trusted so you can focus on growth while we guard your digital space.

How to Conduct an Audit of Your Website?

Now that you are familiar with the concept of a website audit, its advantages, and the various types of audits you can perform, it is time to understand the process of auditing a website.

There are several key steps you must follow to effectively audit your site. Some of the most critical elements of a thorough website audit include:

1. Utilize a Website Audit Tool

As you engage in the website maintenance process, it is essential to position your audit for optimal success. Therefore, employing a website audit tool is advisable. While it is possible to manually audit your website, utilizing an auditing tool will enhance efficiency.

Additionally, it will reduce the likelihood of missing significant issues. Rather than risking the oversight of vital website problems or spending excessive hours on the task, a comprehensive tool can assist you in pinpointing areas that require attention within minutes. This approach allows you to conserve time, ensure nothing is overlooked, and guarantee the success of your audit.

2. Assess Website Design and User Navigation

Assess if your website's design and navigation assist users in quickly locating what they require. Examine navigation menus, buttons, links, and forms to ensure everything is functional.

Use heatmaps or analytics tools to spot high-traffic areas and place key CTAs accordingly. Also, check mobile responsiveness to guarantee usability across all devices.

3. Audit On-Page and Off-Page SEO

The auditing process presents an excellent opportunity to improve your website's SEO. It is advisable to thoroughly evaluate your search engine optimization strategy to ensure you achieve optimal results:

• Utilize a tool to analyze your site's search result rankings.
• Examine how your rankings have evolved since your last audit.
• Evaluate your keyword density to confirm you are using the most effective terms and phrases relevant to your industry.

Both on-page and off-page SEO play a vital role in your overall ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). On-page elements include blog content, graphics, meta descriptions, headers, alt text, and more. Off-page SEO focuses on backlinks and authority-building strategies.

4. Check for Technical Errors

Check for any broken links, 404 errors, old meta tags, or script problems that impact functionality or crawlability. These issues can disrupt user experience and hurt your search performance.

Updating these components ensures that your website remains crawl-friendly and indexed correctly by search engines.

5. Evaluate Content Quality and Consistency

Review your existing content for relevance, clarity, and consistency with your brand voice. Audit blog entries, landing pages, and CTAs for outdated information or formatting issues.

This step also gives you the opportunity to identify new content opportunities and optimize content for user intent.

6. Analyze Competitors

Conducting a competitor analysis is an essential component to incorporate into your regular website audits. This allows you to examine your competitors, assess your ranking against them, and pinpoint areas that require enhancement.

Should you observe that a competitor has recently surpassed you in the SERP, take the time to review their website to determine if they have made any recent updates. You might find opportunities to refresh your website to regain your competitive edge.

Additionally, it is advisable to evaluate the top-ranking websites for a specific keyword, particularly if you are not leading or appearing on the first page of the SERP. The higher your ranking, the more straightforward it will be to attract quality traffic to your website and increase sales. Want to see how your website compares? 

Conduct a fast audit now to identify gaps and opportunities for growth.

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Now, let’s take a closer look at where tools are lacking!

Why Traditional Audit Tools Fall Short?

Website audits are often conducted using a combination of specialized tools, each focused on a specific area. While useful, these tools are often limited in scope and require multiple workflows, especially for websites built on platforms like Drupal.

For example:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider - Concentrate solely on SEO
• GTmetrix / Pingdom - Analyze performance metrics
• Acunetix - Dedicated to security scans
• Site24x7 - Primarily monitors uptime
• WAVE / AccessibilityChecker / accessiBe - Perform accessibility checks on one page at a time

These tools come with three main drawbacks:

1. Fragmentation: Each tool produces isolated reports, making it difficult to get a unified view.
2. Single-Page Auditing: Many tools evaluate just one URL at a time, which is not efficient for large Drupal sites.
3. Lack of Drupal Awareness: Generic tools don’t understand Drupal’s architecture, custom content types, Views, contributed modules, and more.

That’s where Drupal-aware platforms fill the gap. Tools like DrupalFit offer a unified auditing experience that covers SEO, performance, accessibility, security, and uptime at scale and with Drupal context baked in. You can audit multiple URLs at once, group issues by type, and prioritize fixes based on severity, compliance, or performance impact.

To show this, we checked a random website with GTmetrix, a standard performance analysis tool, and DrupalFit, a platform specifically for auditing Drupal.

The goal was to observe not only what each tool measures, but also how they handle scale, context, and actionable insights. Here's what we found:

Use GTmetrix for in-depth, page-level performance troubleshooting and detailed waterfall diagnostics.

Choose DrupalFit for a broader, more efficient approach, especially if you manage a large Drupal site and need one platform that unifies performance, SEO, accessibility, security, and uptime.

Key Takeaways

1. A website audit helps identify issues, shows where improvements can be made, and ensures your website meets business goals.

2. Checks if your backlinks come from relevant, high-authority sites to strengthen, not harm your domain’s credibility.

3. Investing in accessibility audits helps your Drupal site offer an inclusive experience, making it easier for all users to access, engage, and convert.

4. Tools to track ranking changes, assess keyword performance, and ensure your strategy targets the most effective industry terms.

5. A comprehensive auditing experience that includes SEO, performance, accessibility, security, and uptime on a large scale, all integrated with Drupal context.