A complete website audit encompasses everything from front-end design and content to back-end technicalities. Audits help you identify and eliminate errors on a website, improving its overall quality.
To get their website audited, many hire external auditors. They inspect your website and submit a detailed report on its technical performance, SEO, content, user experience, and design. However, the thing is that even the best audits slip past many vital issues.
In our take, any issue that affects a site’s performance is very important. No matter whether the impact is big or small, it is significant. That is why we are bringing this blog post to you. Here, you will learn about common website issues that often go unnoticed by most auditors, which you can mitigate independently.
Common Issues That Get Slipped During Website Audit
There are many factors that can affect a website’s performance. That is why sometimes small factors are overlooked. But with time, those small factors lead to big problems and even crash the websites. Here are some of the common issues that usually get overlooked during a website audit.
Read More: SEO Website Audit: Why It Matters and How It Helps Your Business
1. Broken Internal Links Deep Inside the Site
Checking the broken links is an important step during the website process. However, many of them still commonly slip past during the audits.
Why?
This happens because website audits typically focus on top-level pages and categories that drive revenue and traffic for a website.
Many people overlook the outdated pages of the website, considering them unnecessary. Only because they are indexed or are not getting the traffic. However, until those pages are on your website and have broken links, your site’s reputation is at risk. And search engines might also not score your website well.
That is why it is necessary to run a full broken link audit site-wide. And doing that is not a very technical thing. You can do all that by yourself with the assistance of tools like Screaming Frog.
2. Conflicting or Missing Canonical Tags
Canonical tags might seem a bit technical. However, they are a crucial element that, if overlooked during a website audit, can result in significant financial losses.
These tags basically help search engines determine which version of a page to index, particularly on e-commerce and multilingual websites.
If you miss a single misconfigured canonical tag, search engines will get confused, resulting in a waste of your crawl budget. Ultimately, your website performance will be severely impacted.
But the thing is that if these tags are so crucial, why do they get missed during the audits?
Well, the answer is that canonical tags don’t always throw visible errors. They can look fine on the surface until you compare them across multiple URLs. Some pages might point to themselves, others might point to outdated URLs, or worse, a staging domain like staging.example.com.
This all can be avoided by taking a few simple actions, such as:
- Running a deep audit for every page that has a canonical tag.
- Avoiding unnecessary self-referencing canonicals.
- Make sure you’re not mixing HTTP and HTTPS.
Read More: Top reasons you Must Have an E-commerce Website for Your Business
3. Hidden DNS Record Misconfigurations
DNS records are like the invisible map that tells the internet where your website lives. They control everything, from how your site loads to whether your emails reach their destination.
Yet, despite being so important, DNS issues are among the most overlooked problems in website audits. This is because DNS settings don’t show up in most site crawlers or SEO tools. They live outside your website and are managed by your domain registrar or hosting provider. That means unless someone manually checks them, they stay hidden in plain sight.
However, the fix to this issue is very simple. Now there are tools such as a DNS record checker available. Using the DNS record checker, you can scan your domain and verify all essential records, such as:
- A
- AAAA
- CNAME
- MX
- TXT
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
Running a quick DNS record check takes less than a minute, but it can save hours of debugging later. Because an error in the DNS record can:
- Cause emails to bounce and land in spam.
- Lead to slow site response and downtime.
- Redirect users to their old IP addresses.
4. Hidden Mobile Layout Problems
Think of yourself, if you ever have to perform a website audit, what device will you be using? A desktop system or a laptop, right?
The catch is that most of today’s websites are accessed from mobile devices. And that is where most layout problems hide, especially if the site is too big and has thousands of web pages.
While performing an audit on a desktop, you might think your site looks perfect. But on a smartphone, users may encounter elements that jump around, buttons that move just as they’re about to tap, or text that overlaps images.
These are all the signs of Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), one of Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics that measures visual stability.
But here’s a question that comes to mind. Almost every webmaster and auditor knows the importance of web traffic. Still, the issues slip past, why?
The answer is that many auditors now rely solely on automated tools or desktop simulations. Yet, they also offer mobile layout inspection, which many overlook when configuring the settings.
Ultimately, those tools don’t test how a real user experiences your site on a mobile device. As a result, the shifting elements, hidden buttons, or off-screen text never appear in their reports.
The only fix to this is conducting an audit for the small screens. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check the website’s core web vitals score. In fact, you can also check them via Google Search Console.
If you spot layout issues there, fix them immediately. Fixing these layout shifts isn’t just about design; it’s about better rankings, too.
Conclusion
Those above are the four common website issues that slip past most auditors. Yet, they might look small and unnecessary to you. But avoiding them for a longer period can become the cause of a big problem in the future. So, if you are planning or have gotten an audit done for your website, double-check the website for these issues as well. As websites aren’t the assets to take risks with in this digital era.
