Website Audit
wearesyncopate.com View Staging Site
Performance Metrics
With an overall Performance Metric of 86/100 the website has a good baseline for providing an excellent user experience. With a few adjustments this score can be greatly improved.
At 4.65mb, the home page size is very large and does need to be reduced; we would recommend image compression, page caching and script minification (in addition to other updates) to reduce the page size to significantly improve loading time, and the initial content loading speed.
SEO Metrics
With an overall SEO Score of 81/100 the website has room for improvement. With 6 Warnings and 10 Failures there are severals areas which can be improved on as detailed in the downloadable PDF report.
Notes
Most of the WordPress sites we handle tend to harbor outdated plugins or themes, presenting potential security risks. Many of these sites lack adequate security measures, with instances of outdated PHP versions and deprecated code being common occurrences. To mitigate potential security and performance issues, we strongly advise maintaining a baseline level of upkeep, ensuring all components are regularly updated and monitored on the site.
Summary
On reviewing the initial audit, we found several areas to significantly improve the overall speed and load time of the website. After our updates, we have achieved a 100/100 score on GTmetrix, bringing the load time down 2.9s to 0.56s which is a reduction of approximately 80.69%. Security on the website has also been significantly improved with stricter criteria on WordFence scans and firewall protection, 14 updates were also performed, some minor JS and tag errors have also been solved.
The SEO score was improved from 81 to 88 on staging, with the live website we are expecting the score to increase to 90+, we have also added a few recommendations to further increase the score. A full breakdown of all updates is a as follows:
Updates
- Updated all plugins (11)
- Updated all themes (3)
- Deleted unused plugins (3)
- Installed developer license on ACF
- WordFence firewall protection level updated
- WordFence scan sensitivity increased
- Database prefix is renamed and randomised
- LiteSpeed cache installed and configured:
- Default Cache
- Higher TTL
- Browser Cache
- Image Optimisation
- Mobile Cache
- Guest Mode and Guest Optimization
- CSS, JS and HTML Minification
- Font Display Optimisation
- JS Defer for both external and inline JS
- DNS Prefetch for static files
- Gravatar Cache
- Remove Query Strings from Static Files
- Remove WordPress Emoji
- Remove Noscript Tags
- Fixed JS error “Attestation check for Topics on https://wearesyncopate.com/ failed.”
- Added “span” tag instead of “div” for social icons to fix the error in validator.w3.org report
- Removed “alt” tag missing error in validator.w3.org report
- Fixed: The type attribute for the style element is not needed and should be omitted.
Recommendations
- Update your Homepage Meta Title
- Shorten your Homepage Meta Description
- Ensure all images have relevant ALT content
- Add Google Analytics
- Use modern image formats ( JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, WebP)
Notes
The optimised SEO score will be slightly lower on the staging site due to invalid API keys causing Javascript console errors only on staging, once the updated website is pushed live several metrics will improve and we expect the score to increase above 90.