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How to efficiently audit your websites with Audit Checks
How to efficiently audit your websites with Audit Checks

Use Audit Checks to easily help you find errors to fix it.

Maja Nagelj avatar
Written by Maja Nagelj
Updated over 2 years ago

Nightwatch can crawl your website automatically and regularly to provide you with an exhaustive analysis so that you can make specific improvements to your website and its specific pages. In addition, it comes with pre-set audit checks that help you quickly identify potential problems on the site.

Here's how you can start the Site Audit feature:

  • Click on Site Audit in the sidebar on the left.

  • After that, you will be taken to the Site Audit settings page, where you can customize your settings. (See below)

  • If you would like to crawl your website regularly automatically - toggle on auto-crawling.

  • Click 'Start Crawling.'

Afterward, you can start working on improving the pages one by one. Let's look at how this is done.

Start with Technical Problems

Finding and correcting technical issues helps every aspect of your website. When your site runs more quickly and effortlessly, its SEO and user experience will improve.

Here are some of the common technical problems an auditing tool will analyze and point out:

  • pages of your website that are throwing specific response codes,

  • pages that have a particular amount of broken links,

  • load times of the different pages,

  • missing h1,

  • missing meta descriptions and tags, and much more.

Nightwatch's Pre-Set Audit Checks

With Nightwatch, any technical problems on the site can be pointed out using Audit Checks.

To access Audit Check, follow the steps below:

  1. Click into your preferred website's dashboard,

  2. Click All pages on the left sidebar under Site audit,

  3. Click Audit Checks at the top navigation of this page,

The tool already has pre-set Audit Checks to help identify the issues that most significantly impact your site's performance. Then, you can click on the view and see the affected pages.

💡 Addressing the issues reported in our pre-set views will significantly improve your page.

🔍 When you start improving your site, you can click on the magnifying glass at the right-hand corner of a specific page's URL and start fixing separate pages:

When clicking on the 🔍 icon, you'll see its Page Health which will reveal further details of that particular page.

If the Pre-Set checks are not sufficient, you can always add more by clicking on the + Add check and adding a filter based on the important criteria for your site, and click Save. The view will be added to your checks, and you can access it anytime.

For example, you can create a new check, Indexable (true/false), to identify pages that were indexed or not.

Download or schedule Site Audit reports

You can add the site audit results and checks to your reports, so your clients can stay in the loop of the site's performance and the efforts you make.

You can download the report or schedule them to your or their email addresses in preferred intervals (daily, weekly, monthly).

Here is how you access the report configuration:

  • Select a URL or View of your choice, and click + Open Report Builder on the right side of it.

  • On the reports page, choose the date interval and report template.

  • Then, you can then start customizing your columns by clicking + Add Element and choosing Site Audit Overview and/or Site Audit Pages.

  • Configure the data that you want to add,

  • Enable the Schedule section if you want to schedule the report to be delivered daily/weekly/monthly to your or your client's email, or

  • Click Download Report to generate the report immediately and/or 'Save Report' to schedule it.

You can choose from 2 elements - Overview and Pages.

  • Site Audit Overview

By adding the Site Audit Overview element, you can include the overall site health in your report. In addition, if you choose the option Compare to the previous snapshot, you will see more of all the changes on your site compared to the last time you crawled it.

Here is how the Site Audit Overview element is shown on the PDF report:

  • Site Audit Pages

We would advise adding a Site Audit Pages element to export a more in-depth site audit report. In this way, you can export:

1. Audit checks - this section will help you get a quick overview of various issues with your or your client's website and its pages, such as broken links, missing titles, page server errors, and other discrepancies.

2. List of all pages - enabling this option can add the most important metrics from the Site Audit dashboard for each page of your website.

Nightwatch Site Audit Glossary

Here you can find all the details necessary to read the Site Audit data in Nightwatch.

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