You have just arrived at the five-star resort, where you will be spending the next week. The lobby is filled with fresh linens and warm lighting. You feel at ease as soon as you enter the resort. The beauty of the place makes it easy to relax and enjoy a swim or a visit to the all-inclusive spa.

You feel the same way when you visit a five-star resort as you do when you visit your website.

A UX website audit will help you decide if your visitors will spend time on your site, or bounce to other sites. We’ll provide a UX checklist for your website to ensure users have the best experience. We will also discuss some methods you can do usability tests on your site!

For more information, sign up for revenue weekly in our email newsletter. There’s a lot more to come, so continue reading for your UX website audit checklist.

What is UX? Why is it important to have a UX audit of your website?

Website owners must be familiar with UX. This is why a UX audit website audit is essential to your success online.

What is UX?

UX is an abbreviation of user experience. This refers to the quality of your website’s visitors.

For a few reasons, UX is crucial to your online success.

1. Great UX makes users stay on your site for longer, encouraging them to read more, learn more about you, and buy more of your products.
2. A great UX will keep users from leaving your site, and possibly finding other websites of your competitors.
3. A visually appealing website can help improve credibility — 75% of opinions on website credibility are based on website design
4. A great UX can increase your credibility and help you to sell more products
5. You’ll see an increase in word-of-mouth marketing when you sell more products.
6. Positive user experiences can increase essential metrics used by Google to determine the rank of your website in search engines

Why is it important to conduct a UX audit of your website?

A UX website audit is a great way to make sure your online presence is a success. A UX website audit will help you identify the weaknesses in your website design, and then create a plan to fix them.

A UX website audit can help you identify page load issues and correct poor content formatting. We’ll give you a UX checklist to help you improve your website for users and search engines in the next section.

Your 7-point UX website audit checklist

We’ve provided a UX website audit template below that you can use to improve of your website. Keep track of everything you learn about your website during each step and what you can do to improve it.

1. Take a look at the ambiance

When you enter a five-star resort, the first thing you notice is the relaxed atmosphere. Every element of the experience is unique and memorable. This includes everything from the hotel’s color scheme to the restaurant location. The same principle should apply to your website: When users visit your website, their first impression should always be positive.

These questions will help you decide if your website is positive in “ambiance”.

1. Are your colors consistent across your website?
2. Are your colors harmonious?
3. Is your font easy-to-read?
4. Is your website style consistent with the brands?

These questions will help you to understand where to begin when improving your website. 94% of first impressions are based on a web design companies in Miami.

UX website audit action item: Write down your honest, overall, first impression of your website and take note of things that you didn’t like. From there, you can come up with a game plan on how to fix them.

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2. Organize your most important pages in a welcoming lobby for a hotel.

Do you prefer to walk into a hotel with luggage carts scattered about the lobby, or one that has them neatly organized in a corner? It’s similar to cluttering landing pages or home pages. It doesn’t matter if most people visit your site via the homepage, or click an ad that takes you to a landing page. They must be clean and clutter-free.

Definition of a landing page: A landing page is a page that users land on after clicking an advertisement for your products.

Your homepage is your “front cover” page.

Users could be overwhelmed if they land on your homepage and then leave. Your landing pages should be the same.

While we are on the subject, we recommend that your hallways and rooms be kept clean and tidy. Site visitors desire to see pages that are clean, neat, and visually appealing, just as vacationers do. To ensure your website is organized, follow these steps:

1. Use headings and subheadings to organize your content so readers can quickly scan it
2. Use multimedia and images to break up your text. But don’t use too many, as you will end up with messy pages.   
3. To keep your visitors from getting overwhelmed, use whitespace to allow enough space between elements on your webpage.

UX website audit action item: Make sure that every page on your website is organized and easy to navigate.

3. Your navigation bar should be easy to find, such as the main desk.

There is nothing more frustrating than finding the check-in desk at a hotel when you walk into it. You won’t have the keys to your room if you don’t have a check-in attendant. And you probably won’t know how to find it. A check-in desk at five-star resorts can be thought of as your navigation bar on your site.

Here are the reasons a navigation bar is important:

1. It allows users to find exactly what they are looking for
2. It helps users navigate your site
3. It organizes your website’s content into categories

Your navigation bar should act as a front desk to your website so that users can find the information they need without getting frustrated. Users could leave your website if they don’t have one.

UX website audit action item: Place your navigation bar at the top of your website and make sure that it’s not too cluttered.

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4. Provide fast, high-quality services

Your five-star resort may disappoint you if you have to wait more than half an hour for room service. Websites have less time to please users. Site visitors expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less. If it takes longer, they will likely bounce. You’ll want to ensure that your website pages load quickly.

This is possible by:

1. High-quality graphics and videos
2. Sharing useful, informational content 
3. Create a strong internal linking structure
4. A well-organized navigation bar
5. To make sure that forms work, test them
6. Make sure that calls to action (CTAs), direct users to the right places

UX website audit action item: Run page speed tests to ensure that your site loads quickly and take note of low-quality graphics that you could replace and low-quality content that you could update or rewrite.

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5. Signage should be clear

Signage guides visitors around your resort. Without it, they’ll have difficulty finding common areas such as the bar, pool area, arcade, gift shop, or bathrooms. The signage for a five-star resort is comparable to actionable CTAs on your website. Like a sign at the pool that says “Come and Splash Your Cares Away!” CTAs encourage website visitors to take specific actions.

Every page should contain at least two or three CTAs. These could be any one of the following but they are not restricted to our list.

1. Click here to view our pricing
2. For a free quote, fill out this form
3. Send your email address to receive weekly email updates
4. Get our free tool
5. Continue reading this article
6. Find out more about our pricing plans

These are just a few of the many ways that you can encourage buyers to take the next step on the buyer journey.

UX website audit action item: Create a variety of custom CTAs that you can easily implement on a variety of pages. Think through the messaging to ensure that you encourage users to take the action that you want them to take.

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6. Give something only you can

A five-star resort (and website) that offers something different is memorable. Do you remember the infinity pool? Or the restaurant that served unlimited sushi platters and fed you grapes by the bunch.

Users remember their favorite parts of a website in a similar way to how they remember your favorite parts of a resort. A website’s purpose is to create an online storefront, provide content and information, and promote your brand. You may choose to adopt any one of these goals, depending on the purpose of your website.

No matter what your goal is with your website’s design, providing something original is the best way to achieve it. These are just a few of the places you can amaze your visitors with unique elements on your website.

1. Unique animations, infographics, and videos
2. Your blog
3. Pricing modules
4. Your product pages
5. Use our proprietary tools for free
6. A new website design
7. Fonts with decorative features
8. “About Me/Us page

You can be as creative as you like with your website. We recommend hiring a professional web development and design agency such as Kobe Digital to help you bring your design to life.

UX website audit action item: Take stock of your website and make sure that you offer at least one ultra-unique element. If not, make a list of potential updates that would make your website more unique.

7. Look at your numbers

Your website should be doing the same thing as resorts that use sales numbers to make sure they are on the right track. One of the most important actions in a UX website audit is to look into your analytics. To help you, you can use a tool such as Google Analytics.

It is important to consider metrics such as:

1. Organic Traffic: Traffic which finds your site through search engines
2. Time spent on a page: How long a user spends per page
3. Bounce Rate: The percentage of site visitors that leave your site after viewing one page
4. Dwell Time: The time a user spends on a page after clicking the link in the SERPs

These numbers will give you an idea of the areas that may need to be improved on your website. If your organic traffic drops, you may need search engine optimization (SEO). A professional UX audit of your website might be a good idea.

If your bounce rate is high, you should take a look at your website pages to make sure they aren’t overwhelming your customers or not providing the information they need. Kobe Digital offers Google Analytics consulting services if you have already checked your website metrics and are not sure how to interpret them.

UX website audit action item: Audit your website performance monthly to determine what you’re doing right and what you need to tweak. Or, hire a new york digital marketing agency to do it for you!

Usability testing for any website

UX usability testing is a critical part of your UX website audit template. It can reveal potential bottlenecks in web design. You can opt to have usability testing done on your website. This means real people will interact with it, and you get to see the results. There are many types of usability testing. They’re often paired together like this.

Moderated vs. Unmoderated

This type of usability testing is conducted by a trained researcher, who leads the process. They respond to user questions and answer follow-up questions. Unmoderated UX testing can be done without the involvement of a host.

Remote vs. In-person

Remote UX testing can be done at a person’s house, either via their computers or by phone. In-person usability testing, on the other hand, is done next to a moderator or researcher so they can see how participants interact with a site.

Comparative vs. explorative

Participants can fully immerse themselves in the website during explorative user testing. Participants can share their opinions and provide feedback on specific design elements and concepts. Comparative user experience testing asks participants to evaluate two solutions for a website and then choose the one they like best.

This test is usually used to evaluate your solution against a competitor. Depending on your goals, each strategy has its advantages. Moderated usability testing, for example, is a great way to get instant feedback about your website’s user experience.

Explorative usability testing is a great way to find out what your users think about your site. Kobe Digital can help you learn more about usability tests.

Kobe Digital can conduct UX website audits

Kobe Digital can help you if you are feeling overwhelmed when performing your UX website audit. Kobe Digital offers website analytics to help understand your site’s performance, as well as website user-experience analysis to help understand how visitors interact on your site. Contact us online or call us for a free quote!