Auditing a website can and should be utilized when you want to look at the four components of a site; SEO, Accessibility, Performance and best practices. All of these attributes can help show how a site is truly functioning. Today, I am going to give a tutorial on how to perform an audit on a site I use often, Etsy.com using web.dev, WAVE and Lighthouse. These three sites were created for the purpose of being able to see SEO, Accessibility, Performance and best practices while also providing solutions to areas scored below 100. The website WAVE, however, mostly focuses on accessibility whereas the other two cover the four components in depth!
In my video I explain the four components and what they are as well as three areas for improvement I personally feel Etsy could fix for their users. The first area of improvement is tied in with performance and best practices. Etsy has a rather low performance score and medium best practice score which got my attention. I noticed that a reoccurring suggestion was to remove unused css and java as well as to update front end JavaScript. Removing unused code and or updating code could help the overall performance score Etsy currently has.
The second area of improvement can be seen in performance again. An issue that arose were how images were sized and maintained on Etsy. To solve this the best bet is to clean up existing code so that images are properly managed and resized on the site.
The last area I saw room for improvement was in accessibility. Etsy has almost a perfect score in this category and the only issue I could see from the data was their text size. Adding an option to change text size would be beneficial in cases where the text is small.
Overall, I found that auditing a website can be very easy especially using one of the three websites I talked about in the beginning of my post. Being able to see this information can help improve a site and create a better interface for a user which is the optimal goal for a website at the end of the day!
Check out my Youtube video for a walk through: https://youtu.be/0IEs8ldST5U
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