Drupal Website Audit: Enhance Your Site’s Health and Performance

Imagine you own a car (which you probably do). You have it serviced (or DIY) at regular intervals to make sure there are no issues with it. Like that, a Drupal website audit performs a thorough checkup of the site to make sure it runs smoothly and delivers a positive user experience.

In this blog, I’ll tell you all about what our Drupal site maintenance services involve in this audit. But first, let’s see exactly what a site audit is and what its benefits are.

What is a Site Audit?

A website audit is a detailed analysis of a website’s health and performance across various aspects. It’s like a checkup for your website, identifying areas for improvement in different categories.

Website audit can be categorized as mentioned below:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This ensures your website is easily discoverable by search engines and ranks well for relevant searches.
• Technical Performance: This focuses on aspects that affect how fast your website loads and how well it functions for users.
• User Experience (UX): This evaluates how easy and enjoyable it is for visitors to navigate and interact with your website.
• Security: It assesses how well your website is protected from vulnerabilities and attacks.

By analyzing these areas, a website audit helps identify issues that limit your website’s performance and allow achieving goals. These goals can be anything from increasing sales and conversions to improving brand awareness. Now let’s check out specifically what Drupal website audit is.

Now, understandably, a Drupal website audit is a comprehensive evaluation of a site made on Drupal. Besides the general checkup of 

For this, the audit would delve deeper into aspects specific to Drupal, such as:

• Module Compatibility: It ensures that the modules you’re using are compatible with your current Drupal version. Outdated modules can lead to security vulnerabilities and functionality issues.
• Theme Functionality: Evaluate your Drupal theme’s performance and follow best practices for a better user experience.
• Core Version: Check if you’re using the latest stable version of Drupal that benefits from security updates and performance improvements.
• Security Configuration: This assesses your Drupal site’s security settings to identify any weaknesses that could be exploited by attackers.

In addition to the general audit categories, a Drupal website audit works on Drupal-specific areas to ensure your website is optimally and securely. Do you know why auditing is important? Let’s jump to that.

Why is a Drupal Website Audit Important?

A Drupal website audit is necessary to identify issues, enhance security, boost SEO, and optimize website performance. So, it is important to audit your website to maintain user experience to get the best of your potential website.

Key benefits of auditing Drupal website

• Identifying Issues: A thorough audit can uncover issues such as broken links and security vulnerabilities. So, any outdated modules or themes can be updated which might create a larger problem.
• Performance Optimization: An audit can reveal any website optimization that can be performed, such as caching, database optimizations, and code improvements. That can lead to faster page load times and a better user experience.
• Security Improvements: It focuses on the importance of web security. This audit can help identify and address security risks, such as outdated software or improper permissions, reducing the risk of data breaches.
• Better SEO Optimization: By identifying and fixing issues such as duplicate content, missing meta tags, or slow-loading pages. It can also help improve search engine optimization (SEO).
• User Experience Enhancement: Information about user interactions and behavior, can provide insight into how users are engaging with your website. That can help you make informed decisions to enhance the overall user experience.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Regular audits can prevent future problems. By identifying and addressing issues, you can avoid costly security breaches and extensive website repairs later.

From this, you can easily understand why professional Drupal development experts always keep a regular check for website audits. With this are you ready to uncover what Drupal website audit service provides? Let’s discover them.

What’s Covered in a Drupal Website Audit? Key Elements and Issues.

A Drupal website audit typically covers several services to assess the overall health, performance, and security of the site. During the audit, our Drupal experts aim to identify a bunch of key issues that may impact the quality of your website. Let me give you a better idea on what’s covered in the different services of a Drupal website audit and the issues they aim to discover and fix.

Security Audit

This is often the first step as it identifies potential vulnerabilities that could impact the entire audit process. It focuses on checking modules, configuration, and core versions for security and permissions management.

Key Elements:

• Module and Theme Vulnerability Checks: Scans for known security weaknesses in the modules you’re using, ensuring they are up-to-date and have no vulnerability.
• Core Version Analysis: Verifies you’re using the latest stable version of Drupal to benefit from security patches and bug fixes.
• Configuration Review: Assess your Drupal site’s security settings to identify any weaknesses that could be exploited by attackers.
• Permission Management: Evaluates user permissions and access controls to ensure only authorized users have access to sensitive information.

Issues

Here’s a list of issues identified and resolved by the security aspect of our Drupal website audit.

• Outdated Modules and Themes: Using modules or themes that haven’t been updated in a long time can introduce security vulnerabilities.
• Unpatched Drupal Core: Not running the latest stable version of Drupal Core leaves your site exposed to known security exploits.
• Weak Configurations: Improper security settings within Drupal can create openings for attackers to gain access to your website.
• Insecure User Permissions: Assigning excessive permissions to user roles can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive information.

The ultimate aim is to make sure the website is secured against all sorts of online threats like malicious attacks, SQL injections, etc.

Performance Audit

Once the site is secured, the audit dives into performance. This involves checking modules, theme, and database optimization along with caching configuration.

Key Elements:

• Module Performance Analysis: Identifies modules that might be causing slowdowns or bottlenecks in your website’s performance.
• Theme Optimization: Evaluate your Drupal theme’s efficiency and suggest improvements for faster loading times.
• Database Optimization: Analyzes your Drupal database for inefficiencies and recommends ways to optimize queries and improve performance.
• Caching Configuration: Review your Drupal caching settings to ensure they are configured optimally for faster page loads.

Issues

Here’s a list of issues identified and resolved by the security aspect of our Drupal website audit.

• Inefficient Modules: Certain modules might be poorly coded or resource-intensive, causing slow loading times.
• Unoptimized Themes: Themes with complex layouts, heavy images, or unoptimized code can significantly impact website performance.
• Database Issues: An unoptimized database can hinder website performance.
• Cacheable Issues: Improper caching configuration in Drupal can lead to unnecessary database queries and slow page loads.

The ultimate goal is to make the site as fast and well-performing as possible.

SEO Audit

With a secure and performant website, now we shift to search engine optimization. The audit examines on-page and technical SEO along with an assessment of overall content quality.

Key Elements:

• On-Page SEO: Checks for missing meta descriptions, proper keyword usage within Drupal content structures, and optimized title tags.
• Technical SEO: Evaluate the technical aspects of your Drupal website that can affect SEO, such as mobile-friendliness, sitemap structure, and internal linking practices within menus and content.
• Content Quality Assessment: Analyzes the quality and relevance of your Drupal content from an SEO perspective, identifying areas for improvement to enhance search engine ranking.

Issues

Here’s a list of the issues taken care of by the SEO aspect of our Drupal website audit.

• Missing Meta Descriptions: Content lacking meta descriptions does not provide search engines with relevant information about your pages.
• Improper Keyword Usage: Stuffing content with keywords or not using them strategically can negatively impact SEO ranking.
• Technical SEO Errors: Issues, like broken internal links, mobile-friendliness problems, or a poorly structured sitemap, can reduce your website’s crawlability and ranking.
• Low-Quality Content: Content that is irrelevant, or poorly optimized for search engines won’t perform well in search results.

The aim of this element is to make sure your website and its pages rank on the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages).

User Experience (UX) Audit

Now that technical aspects are fulfilled, the audit evaluates how users interact with your site. This involves analyzing navigation, content clarity, mobile responsiveness, and ensuring accessibility.

Key Elements:

• Navigation Analysis: Evaluates usability of the website’s navigation system, ensuring it’s clear for Drupal’s menu functionalities.
• Content Usability: Assesses the readability, structure, and organization of your Drupal content, ensuring it’s easily readable and engaging for users.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Check if your Drupal website adapts well to different screen sizes and devices, providing a seamless experience for mobile users.
• Accessibility Review: Evaluate if your Drupal website adheres to accessibility guidelines, ensuring it’s usable by people with disabilities.

Issues

This aspect of the Drupal website audit identifies what may be causing issues with the user experience.

• Confusing Navigation: Complex navigation menus can make it difficult for users to find what they’re looking for on your Drupal website.
• Unusable Content: Content that is poorly written, disorganized, or visually unappealing can lead to a negative user experience.
• Mobile Unfriendliness: A website that doesn’t adapt well to mobile devices can reduce a significant portion of your audience.
• Accessibility Issues: Websites that lack accessibility features can exclude users with disabilities.

We make sure your website looks, feels, and works as well as you had hoped.

Content Audit

The final audit delves into your website’s content. This step involves creating inventory, reviewing content performance, content strategy, and recommendations for optimizing search results.

Key Elements:

• Content Inventory: Analyzes the existing content within your Drupal site, identifying outdated, irrelevant, or duplicate content.
• Content Performance Review: Evaluate how well your Drupal content is performing in terms of user engagement, conversions, and SEO metrics.
• Content Strategy Alignment: Assess how well your Drupal content aligns with your overall website goals and target audience.
• Content Optimization Recommendations: Provides suggestions for improving your Drupal content for better user engagement, SEO performance, and achieving your website objectives.

Issues

In this part of the audit, we aim to explore and find the issues that surround the content on your website.

• Outdated or Irrelevant Content: Content that is no longer relevant or hasn’t been updated in a long time can provide a poor user experience and hinder SEO performance.
• Duplicate Content: Having the same content appear on multiple pages can confuse search engines affecting your website’s ranking badly.
• Unoptimized Content: Content that lacks proper formatting, and internal linking, might not engage users effectively.
• Content Gaps: Missing content on important topics can prevent your website from achieving its goals.

We make sure the content (both written and visual) is as user-friendly, captivating, and informative as possible.

Note: Specific services included in a Drupal website audit can vary depending on your website’s unique needs.

You can have a consultation with our experts and find out more about our Drupal website maintenance services, of which the audits are a part.

FAQs About Drupal Website Audit

Conclusion

Conducting a thorough Drupal website audit is crucial to ensure the security, performance, and overall health of your website. By following a structured checklist you can identify and address issues that may be impacting your website’s user experience and ranking.

By taking the below steps you leverage the power of Drupal website audits and ensure your website thrives in the evolving digital era.

• Use the provided checklist as mentioned above for your next Drupal website audit.
• Consider hiring Drupal developers for a more comprehensive audit, especially if you have a complex website.
• Stay informed about the latest Drupal security updates and best practices to keep your website at its best.

If you need more details about the process and roadmap, you can opt for our Drupal consulting services for detailed insights.

Regular audits can be a great investment in your website’s success, helping you maintain a strong online presence and attracting a wider audience. So consult with our Drupal development experts today!