How to Know if Your Website is Actually Working

Welcome to the BlueVignette podcast, where we explore the Adventist digital ecosystem. I'm Luke Virugia, co-founder of BlueVignette, and I'll be your host. In each episode, we'll sit down with different leaders to uncover their insights, hear inspiring stories, and get their hard-earned wisdom for future ministry leaders. So let's begin.

On today's episode, we're doing something a little different. We are going to share our playbook for doing website audits. If done correctly, these can save you money and really help you level up your web presence. By the end of this episode, you'll know what to look for, what tools you should use, and when you need help.

Hey, Luke. Hello, Adam. Oh, it's good to see your face. I've got a question and I was thinking... who is the best person to ask this question of and you're it.

Thank you. I appreciate the vote of trust, but what's the question? Let's start there. Audits, audits for websites I feel are a thing that a lot of people are missing.

They don't do it. Someone will oftentimes get a website built and they may be maintaining it, keeping it going, but when should someone do a website audit? What is a website audit? Only questions.

Sure. At the basic level, the idea of a website audit is coming to your online presence, looking at the website and figuring out, is it doing what you paid it to do? Like, is it actually doing its job? And there are so many variables to a good website.

And a lot of that is going to be dependent on your needs. And so there's, there's a lot of variables there. So there's no like red light, green light. This website is good.

This website is not good. So there is like that investigation that needs to happen in order to know the answer to that question. Maybe the website that's not worked. like the 404 error, that might get the, this one is bad. Yeah, that's definitely gonna give you an answer.

If your website is not there or it's throwing errors at people, that's a very easy start to your auditing experience. But yeah, generally speaking, especially if your website is a little bit older, if it's been around for a while, I think you can benefit from an audit at any time, even if your website is new, because there's no guarantee that it was built perfectly the first time around. I would say, especially if your website is getting 12, 24 months old, you want to be asking yourself, is this still doing what it's supposed to be doing, even if it was perfect when it was built? Right.

That's a really good point. Yeah, we, like, hey, we built this thing. We spent all the time, money, energy to build a thing. And then, yeah, it's just supposed to work forever, right?

It's not supposed to touch it. Yeah, because we've trued our cars that way, right? Like, you know, you buy a car and then it'll just work indefinitely with no fuel, oil changes or any of the above. Yes.

Well, as I think about the different ministries and we are increasingly in an age of websites matter. This is how people connect with us. Social media is obviously very important, but this is the place where you get to control the messaging. So yeah, for the next little while, let's talk about website audit.

So I'm gonna go through a few questions I have. You are the expert in this area. When someone is doing a website audit, what are just kind of the basic things that we're going to think about when doing a website audit? Okay.

So at the, at the top of the list, I kind of mentioned it briefly before, but I just want to highlight that I want to understand what the website is for, because what we're measuring in a website, it's going to be different between, you know, an e-commerce website or an informational website. So we want to understand your objectives first. So, so we can measure what it's, what you have against those objectives, but the, the general buckets that I, that I think about as far as what we would be auditing, the things that we'd be looking at. One is the technical part of the site.

Does the site conform to modern standards that could be, uh, from a security perspective, that could be, uh, from a software perspective, is it up, is the software up to date that's running your site in the background? Um, is that what's the speed of the site? Because that has a massive effect on the experience that people have, but it also has an effect on how you appear in search results. And so there's a lot of those things.

So there's the technical side of it, right? There's the. Uh, there's the user experience, the design, there's, there's that side, which again, that's going to affect, are there, are there calls to action? Can people do what you're actually asking them to do easily?

Uh, is, is there accessibility issues? You know, if you, uh, you know, if you have a website that is not tailored in such a way that screen readers can use it, then people who are vision impaired won't be able to access it. In the user experience bucket i'll say there's a bunch of things that we look at and i can go like more dangerous but just to add a hot that high level other would be the. That security aspect, I mentioned that in the technical, but there are some other things, you know, are you compliant from a legal perspective for the country that you're in?

There's, you know, the GDPR compliance in Europe. There's like, there's all of these different requirements depending on where you live and where your website is hosted. And, you know, we need to ask those questions, even though you don't necessarily think of those when you think of websites. Oh yeah.

You're, you're, you're blowing my mind. There's like all these things like, Oh yeah, I forgot about that. And there's that too. And there's that too.

Man, there is a lot. I think of the, We're, you know, audit. Like, are you doing the thing that you say you're doing? Like, and let's go into, you know, if like a financial audit, let's get into the books on this.

So let's jump into a couple of questions. What are some of the common issues that you might uncover or that you have uncovered while doing an audit? Probably one of the ones I have found more often than not lately is websites that are from a technical perspective, performing really poorly. The standards for what people expect as far as performance change over time as infrastructure improves.

And so I've had a lot of the clients that I've done audits for recently. That has been one of the, one of the aspects. Another one that I think I see more often than not is in the, in that UX bucket that the The messaging on the website is unclear that it is, it probably made sense to the person that wrote it or the owner because they know what they're doing or they know their ministry or business better than anybody else. And so they can throw information at it, but it's not the messaging is, is, is not clear.

And then they're not necessarily giving the people what they need to make the decision they want them to make. So interesting. One of the things that I think about. an audit from, it's difficult to remember what it's like to not know something. And I think we get kind of blind to, yeah, that's just where all the buttons are supposed to go and those things.

And maybe having a third party kind of like, are you sure that's your call to action? Is that the right thing? Are you sure that's visible? Anything, any surprise?

What about someone coming to you and have you had that experience where They thought that they were clear on their website and then you were asking them like, actually, this isn't clear. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I have one of the projects that we, that we worked on was for, it was for a ministry and they had, they had campgrounds and as we looked at the website originally, it had some really old photos and it was. Very unclear why people would want to stay there. Like, is it for, is this for groups? Is this like a weekend getaways or like an Airbnb?

Is it a, you know, add to them, they knew what they did, right? That they knew that, well, we're here because we have a campground and we expect like school groups to come and book the whole thing out. You know, whereas that, that wasn't what was clear from, from the site. You know, we, we got them to, you know, Get some better photography, let's change the messaging, let's give you, like, booking request forms so people can, like, see how you expect them to interact with you, right?

Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's interesting. I think that having that third party person come in and evaluate, all right, what are the things that, what are you truly trying to communicate? How do you get to that clarity?

And that's some of the things I think an audit can help with. Yes. Yeah. That external perspective, there's a engagement that we're doing right now, which is it's a lot bigger than a general audit.

It's actually, you know, order of magnitude larger because it's, it's for a large software project. But the, one of the things that I found really interesting as a part of this process, we interviewed, as I said, this is a much larger project, but we interviewed multiple people in the organization and we. polled them to find out like, how are they using it? What are they doing? What's important to them?

What are the pain points? And the thing that I found really interesting is our initial contact, what they communicated the pain points to be only represented about 30% of what we actually found out the problems were by the time we had spoken to others in the organization and, uh, you know, looked at what they already had and gone through that process. And so I think I just wanted to say that out loud to highlight the value of the external party. those people all work in the same office. They could have gone and spoken to each other and came to those conclusions, but nobody did that.

Right. And that's why we were valuable in the process. Yeah. It's kind of like, you never know what you're going to find when you start, uh, you know, digging in and figuring those things out and having a third party come in and, uh, really take a look.

All right. So if we're going to break these things down a little more individually, Uh, let's, let's jump on the technical side because I think that is something that can be kind of daunting to people. All right. My website is up.

What, what, what technical things will you be looking for? Um, when it comes to an audit, what are just some of the bullet points? Okay. You actually highlighted one of these earlier in the conversation for a force, right?

If there's a broken link, if there's broken links on the site, you're going to want to make sure that they're. they're sewn up, you're going to want to have a look at the, uh, the speed at which a site loads. And, you know, just for, you know, you can do this for free yourself. There's a great website called GT metrics. You can go and you can use that and that'll test your website and you'll see how fast it loads.

When there's some, like there's some terms in there that you may not be familiar with, like LCP, which is like the largest content for paint. Like, you know, when, when does like most of the website spring into view these kinds of things, you can see how long it takes. And if there's something that's taking way too long to load that's forcing everything else to be slow at loading it so anyway these things you don't need to be a technical person to be able to get value from that what that tells you is. There's problems here that at a technical level need to be resolved some of the other things that we look at would be what you know what you're built with if you're using wordpress then do you have the latest versions right is it and that would be what you're checking for security because generally aside from adding extra features. newer versions, uh, add security patches.

And the longer you go without having updated software, the more vulnerable your site will be. So that's one of the, one of the key things to look at. There are other things like, uh, on the SEO side, you can, there are tools where you can use to look at, you know, are you using title tags? Like, you know, and you know, your H1, H2, H3.

And if you're not familiar with those, what that does is they're the headings of your site, the, and the lower the number. the more importance that has as far as Google is concerned, right? As far as search engines are concerned. So if you have a title and the title of your page is home and you're using an H1 tag and all you're saying is home, that communicates nothing useful. Okay.

Google is going to look at that and go, congratulations. You have a page about home. So, right. So my point is that's one of the things that we look at, you know, are these being used appropriately?

So Is it accessible? Is it crawlable by search engines? Can search engines see it? And more importantly now than ever, and it's only going to increase in importance, is this idea of, uh, is it visible to AI?

You know, AI search is something that is very, very important and getting even more important as time goes on as, uh, AI. Uh, technology chatbots are getting more sophisticated. You know, there's the, you see the little link icons and then there's like the source reference where they're getting that information from you want to be there because this is growing at a huge rate. This whole industry is just ballooning right now.

And so, yeah, that's, that's another part of the process that you'd look at. Got it. If you're having an audit done for you, person doing the audit is going to have these different tools to check. Are your plugins done correctly?

Are your all the, yeah, the 404 errors, all of these things, which can be kind of daunting and complicated, but that is why you might have someone else do it because you can audit yourself. There's nothing stopping you from auditing yourself. And I think that's probably a good place to start. What would you say about someone who wants like, yeah, I mean, can I audit myself?

What would that look like? Yeah, like at a very base level, Uh, ask yourself, you know, what, what do I expect from another website? You know, do, do all of the, at a user experience level, do all of the things make sense? Is the heading communicating what I'm doing?

Can the target market identify themselves in the site? Yes, this is a site for me. So people like me do things like this is something that we've talked about on the show a number of times. Uh, so that would be on the one aspect of it on the technical side of it.

I mentioned GT metrics before. That's a great thing. There's there are other tools. I wouldn't recommend any particular one over another, but there's a lot of SEO evaluation tools out there, um, that you can use that will, that will give you a clear report and give you some recommendations.

Um, often it's like limits the number of reports you can do. So if you just do a one-off, it'll give you some information and then, you know, perhaps you can, you can apply that. But the other thing that I would say, if you're trying to do it yourself without engaging an external party would be to get your. a friend of yours or somebody else that's in the industry, but not actually a friend, but not someone in the company and get them and ask them, does this make sense? You know, like is everything where you would expect it to be?

Um, you know, that that's another way you can do it without necessarily engaging another provider, just to get someone who's not as familiar with the subject matter. Yeah. I think like you just go through and just like click all the buttons, they all go where they're supposed to go. And does all of those things make sense?

I think you can also try it on like mobile versus desktop, resizing the screen. Is everything working? How long does it take to load? You can use like incognito mode on different browsers and do some of those things.

So yeah, I think there's, you can definitely do that. I was just going to say, you mentioned using incognito mode. The reason that you do that is because your web browser keeps a cache of all of the sites that you go to regularly. And so you will see your own site way faster than anybody else is going to.

And so having the benefit of seeing it through the eyes of a new user is going to be a really big benefit to you. doing that, different browser, mobile, also even, yeah, just like Googling yourself or words that you might, someone might use if they were trying to find you and how long does it take you to find you? Or again, like you said, you can just be a friend. It doesn't have to be a total third party, but like, hey, try to find me without using my name. That's kind of a tricky one.

No, that is a really good point. You mentioned just briefly in there also mobile optimization. The question you asked earlier about what's something you see very regularly. This is a big one.

So many websites that I see now have fairly severe problems with their mobile optimization. And I think one of the reasons for that is that at least these days, mobile optimization is built into a lot of website themes and that's great. But when you get in there and you edit a theme and edit and edit and edit and edit in desktop mode and you don't go and you and refine it in the mobile, which is something that happens with a lot of websites that are done by, you know, and I'm not casting shade on any particular freelances or whatever, but what I'm meaning is that people who are less experienced or perhaps have less quality assurance. processes in place, often that's one of the areas that their performance will be lower. And so depending on how much attention was placed there in the original build, often people have mobile experiences that are not great.

And now more than half of all web traffic is mobile. So if you're not paying attention to that, you're really doing a disservice to more than half of the people who are caring enough about your organization to come and look at your website. Yeah, I'd be curious to see I don't know how you do this but like the first time someone goes to a website How many times is that on mobile versus on desktop like, you know, that's an interesting one. But yeah mobile is a big deal So when we're thinking have been okay, you know audits.

Have you ever seen a time where? Maybe someone paid you do an audit, but they actually ended up saving money because they did the audit You're like that's which is kind of counterintuitive like hey spend money on something, but it'll cost less Yes, I had a, I had a customer come to me and they sent me a message and said, I need a website rebuild. You know, we need this, this, this, this, and they gave this massive list of all the things that they needed. And I was like, Oh, great.

They were happy to help you. Let's, let's have an audit. Let's have a look at what you have right now. And I went through what they had right now and what they had was actually fine.

But the, the messaging on the homepage was, was really confusing. And like the, the navigation was, was. broken, like it had not been configured properly. And I said, I'm very happy to do a, a full project and we can build a thing for you. But in reality, your biggest problems is just that you have a couple of usability issues.

Um, you know, you're unhappy to help you do them. Or if you're willing to go in and check the menus, uh, section in WordPress, you could probably reorder that yourself. That's really all your problems, you know that that's that's it. And they come back to me and they were so appreciative, right?

They were, they were like, Oh, I didn't know I could do that. I thought this was, you know, and so that's an extreme example because this person was very much non-technical and they, they didn't understand what they had. But my point is a lot of times people, people can come to you and they can tell you anything. There is nothing that will stop. uh, people from being, uh, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to say outright lies because yes, sure.

There are some, but like, uh, some people are just not, uh, they're just not, they haven't had enough experience to know the answers to some of these things. And they'll say, Oh no, you need to have a full rebuild or whatever. And so, but if you don't do the effort to first sit down and say, what's going on here, you could be saving yourself a lot of money just by looking at what you already have and deciding how you can use that best rather than scrapping the whole thing. It can save you money on the other end.

There's actually multiple ways, right? And so I just want to point out a couple of extra ways. One is that you can see, it can save you money from the perspective of learning what, uh, like what the next step looks like and how it can be better. There was a, there was a client that I worked with who, uh, they were, they wanted an upgrade to their website.

And one of the questions that I asked them when I was doing their audit was What is something in your business that takes a disproportionately large amount of time from your staff members. And this is, this is one of my go-to questions that I like to do because I like to think about how do we automate things? How do we provide more value? And they, uh, they came back and they said, Oh, there's this paperwork process that people have to in, in our organization, people have to submit this paperwork and it's never submitted.

Right. Our admin staff spent so many hours a week running around trying to get these filled in, right. And calling the people back and trying to, and I said, Oh, okay. Well, what if we, rather than that being a form, what if we created a, like a process on the website, a form on the website, multi-step form that could collect all of that information.

So when they submit the information, they can't submit. minute until it's all complete. And they said, Oh, that's a great idea. And anyway, so long story short, at the end of that process, they, I think they estimated that we were saving like somewhere between like, like 10 and 20 hours of staff time by implementing a form. Wow.

A form, right. And so that's something that a great example of something we did that was not a difficult thing to do. But we had to understand their process first. And then when we understood that we could do something about it.

What I love about that is that when I was thinking of the word audit, like a website audit, that's not even where, where I went. And I think that, you know, I was thinking the technical part that makes sense, you know, going through and seeing if the plugins, how fast is the website? Do I have the right level of hosting that kind of stuff? But, uh, what you're bringing to mind is I think one of the things that I really love about Blue Vineyard is that you exist. to help ministries grow technologically.

And, and it's more than just, okay, we know how the internet works and we can make your website faster. We want to learn about your ministry and we want to learn about what you're doing. And because we speak the same language and we can all these things, there's, there's more to there than just the technical side of it. Yeah.

And that human element is that is so Yeah, it is vital because I've, I have spoken to one of the local conferences that we work with and they had a, an agency that we're working with prior to us. And one of the things that they commented on after our, after our project was that it took them so long to be able to get anything done because they could not effectively communicate our worldview. You know, that was, that was one of those things. And so for me, the audit process is.

Yes, the technical side of it. It's a large part of it. But if I don't understand what you're trying to achieve and why you're trying to achieve it, then it's very hard for me to make good recommendations on the other side. For sure.

How long does a typical audit take? Like what's involved in that? Like if someone says, Hey, I want to do an audit of my website. What's kind of that?

What does that process generally look like? Uh, so the, the process itself, um, is, is measured, uh, you know, is usually goes over the course of a few days. Cause usually there's a, you know, there's a conversation that has to happen and then there's the actual, you know, looking into it. And so usually it's a few days.

So you could say within a week, normally we would have the audit back and ready. Um, there are, you know, there's audits and then there's audits, you know, some people just need us to look at the, the technical side of it and have a quick review that can be done same day. As I said, we don't think of all of them as being created equal at the very base level. We can have a look at the site.

We can run some tests on it and give you feedback of this is what we would do differently. Um, that's something we can do quite easily. Very happy to do that for anyone. Anytime anyone who's listening, if you want that for your website, reach out to us.

Um, but then we have like paid evaluations, paid audits where we can spend a lot more time, go more deeply into your processes, talk to multiple team members, build a report, you know, like there's, we can go deeper, but that is, and that's more appropriate when we're talking about a much larger website, right? A much larger project. That's more mission critical. And we're not talking about something that is only viewed occasionally.

So. Yeah. I love that you're willing to do that for people. It shows that you have the heart of ministry and a desire to, to help.

Um, yeah, that's fantastic. Who needs an audit? Who, who's in like, do I need an audit? Who's real quick?

Who needs an audit? Ah, okay. Who needs to audit? I would say anybody who relies on their website as a first point of contact for their organization, especially those people, right?

I think everybody that has a website. Uh, needs that, except for the people, if the website is your personal project, if it's a hobby project where you're using it as like, you know, it's a, an online repository of your experiences or something like that. Sure. Cool.

Have that. Enjoy that. It's a great thing, but if you rely on it in a professional sense, and I mean that in the ministry, uh, in the ministry as well, I don't know. I don't just mean that exclusively in a commercial sense, but if you rely on it in a professional way, then it should be treated like a part, like a professional. piece of equipment in your organization.

Just like if you have a vehicle for your organization, it gets serviced regularly and it gets repaired when it's broken and it gets upgraded when it no longer serves the purpose. We need to think of our websites as the same thing. Just because they're not a physical item makes them feel somehow less important, but they're not. And I would say If you're thinking oh is this me i think i've been clear but i'll add to that to describe the part that it plays.

I think people misunderstand what a website is for right and yes you personally as an organization or you individually as an organization can have. Um, other reasons that it exists, like I was talking about the example before of like streamlining the office work. Sure. That's another reason you can have it.

But I mean, just generally the place that it occupies in most organizations exists in right in the middle of your funnel, right? At the top of your funnel. That is where the social media lives. That is where, you know, a viral tick tock can bring.

Thousands of people bringing attention to your brand, but as soon as someone goes there and becomes interested in what you're doing, the very next thing that they want to do is to get more information. And the automatic thing that people are going to be doing is going to your website. They're going to want to know, Oh, well, I want to know more. So I'm going to go here.

And that's where they expect to get the primary information around what you do. And then the bottom of the funnel is the cause to action on the website, right? Is whether that is. Give us a phone call, set up a Bible study, uh, come to the event, whatever that, that call to action.

That's, that's your bottom of funnel. So the, the website is what nurtures people from that first point of contact through to the action you want them to take. And so if you have anything that you're trying to get people to do, then an audit is a very smart thing to have as a part of your regular, uh, operations. Yeah, I love the analogy.

Did you change the oil? Your spark plugs, like all of those things. You know that if you don't pay attention to those things, it's eventually gonna go wrong. And the longer you wait, the worse it's gonna be.

And so that's what I think of when I'm learning about audit. All right, I've got a business, Luke. I wanna do an audit. What, how would I, how would I go about that?

What are some of my options and including using blue vineyard? Sure. So the, the first point of core what we were saying earlier, you can have a look yourself. You can, you can get a lot of the way there.

You may not be able to have an external viewpoint. But you can certainly, uh, look at those, those basics. We recommended some tools earlier. The next step, I guess, away from that is talking to someone outside.

Like we were saying, getting, getting a friend, getting someone else to, to look at it. If you would like to have a professional look at it, then yeah, by all means reach out to your provider. Most providers do do offer it. I think a lot of people think about it as a, uh, yeah, as a sales tool, it's sort of like, you know, I'm going to. do this and I'm going to do it.

So you give, so you give us your work. Um, I think that's one of the reasons that we offer like paid levels because we don't know. I think there's a value in an audit, you know, in and of itself. So, um, regardless of whether you want to pay for it or you would just be interested in it as a, as a free service, if you're a ministry, we're very happy to offer that, that initial service, you know, just to. for your own knowledge, you know, by all means reach out, contact us.

You can get on our website, bluvinion.com. You can send us an email, hello at bluvinion.com, and we'd be very happy to organize a time to get the information we need and do that for you. It's a good thing to do. I've got different websites and things that I'm in charge of or I have influence on and I want to go do it.

So thank you, Luke, for your time and for sharing kind of the importance of doing an audit and some of those things that are easy that we can do ourselves. And then like you said, if our website is something we depend on, and it probably is, if you're doing any kind of business or ministry, it probably is, yeah, do an audit. Thanks, Adam. All right, we'll talk to you soon.