 Today we're talking about how to audit your website as a web designer or developer here on The Journey. The full scope of benefits that come from website audits is massive. The goals to improve your client's online visibility, grow new revenue sources, and enhance the overall experience customers have with utilizing your services. But if you haven't been prioritizing your performance metrics in your build, this video is for you. Maybe you've heard of the famous proverb, the best time to plan a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time is now. It's never too late to start. Well the ever-evolving platform algorithms may seem like a lot to keep up with. Totally get that. But it doesn't have to involve a difficult task to stay current. No. Comprehensive web presence audits are quite a bit more than just performance optimization. Reviewing everything from the brand's image to content optimization and even security, which we've talked a lot about on The Journey, will provide you with valuable insights into your overall online presence. And here's the thing. Google's page experience metrics and core web vitals can get pretty technical pretty quickly. And even for designers and developers who are familiar with this territory, taking action on these performance action items can get pretty complicated. And if you haven't considered how these new changes will impact your online presence, then please consider this your official wake-up call. All right. Let's get started with your website performance audit. And fortunately, when it comes to monitoring your website's performance, guess what? There's some great free benchmark testing tools. There's Google page speed insights, also Chrome user experience report, and you can even search console's core web vitals report. But remember, if your site doesn't accommodate Google's new requirements, it's likely that your SEO ranking will suffer. Don't want that. And it will be harder to find your website online. And for those of you who are using WordPress to build your websites, I've got a couple of great performance optimization plugins as well. WP Rocket for code optimization, Smush Pro for image compression and lazy load, and disable cart fragments for that WooCommerce optimization. Basically, your performance score is made up of these key metrics, starting with first contentful paint. It's basically the time the page starts loading to when any part of the page shows up on the screen. Then you've got your speed index, which is how quickly content shows up when your website loads. Largest contentful paint is how long it takes to the largest image or text blocks on your website to load. Time to interactive is basically how long it takes for when your webpage starts to load to when someone can actually interact with the loading resources, like clicking on their page or a button or a link. Then there's total blocking time, which is the total amount of time between the first content painful and the time to interactive. And then lastly, we have cumulative layout shift. And it's just the total layout shift score for your entire website. So if your website loads and you're there's kind of elements kind of shift randomly, it's bad for accessibility. So they want to make sure that score is really, really low. And here are three additional categories that Google measures. Loading time, the name kind of gives it away, but loading time is how fast the main content in your page loads. Interactivity measures the time for when someone first clicks on your page to win the browser. So Google Chrome or Safari begins processing that info. And then visual stability means that your site is free of distracting or unexpected content like a pop up window. Your accessibility score is another important metric. It measures how accessible your site is to different kinds of people. So a couple of examples of things that Google checks for are a high contrast between your site background and your texts, captions on videos and then alt text on images. And Google also grades on the overall SEO performance as well as adherence to best practices and speed and reliability. And then sites that get a high score across all of these categories will perform better in a Google search. And one thing I want you all to keep in mind is web presence auditing is an ongoing process. It can be helpful to get started by breaking your audit down into manageable daily or even weekly sprints, but in order to help keep track of your results and findings as you go. The second step is then to prioritize your sprints, which we highly recommend putting into a performance audit at that top of the list. Now there's no such thing as a finished product. You've heard me say that before. And when it comes to maintaining and involving online presence, keep that in mind. Simply put, staying in line with the current trends and the changes in the web environments is critical to the success of your business. The changes to Google search will for sure present challenges to many business owners, but with some hard work, making the necessary fixes will pay off. And as always, your journey does not have to end here. We have over 200 videos to help you with your business and with your clients. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe. This is The Journey. We'll see you next time.