Checks Direct - Website Report

#### Introduction

This technical report provides a comprehensive analysis of the website’s performance, technical SEO, search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies, and technology stack. By identifying both strengths and areas for improvement, this report aims to guide enhancements that will significantly impact performance and conversions.

#### Key Findings

1. Optimise JavaScript and CSS: Reducing unused JavaScript and CSS can significantly improve loading speeds and reduce network activity, enhancing user experience.

2. Implement HTTPS: Transitioning to HTTPS is crucial for securing data transmission, which is essential for user trust and meeting modern web standards.

3. Improve Cache Policies: Efficient caching strategies can reduce page load times for repeat visitors, improving overall site performance.

4. Lazy Load Images: Implementing lazy loading for images not immediately visible can optimise initial loading times, focusing resources on key content.

5. Simplify DOM Structure: Reducing DOM size can improve rendering performance and decrease layout reflows, resulting in a smoother user experience.

6. Address Broken Links: Fixing broken links will improve user experience and assist search engine crawling, avoiding potential penalties.

7. Enhance Content Quality: Increasing the depth and relevance of content can better meet user intent and improve search engine rankings.

8. Strengthen Backlink Profile: Building and maintaining high-quality backlinks can support SEO efforts and improve keyword rankings.

9. Ensure Regular Updates: Keeping WordPress, plugins, and server software up-to-date is crucial for security and performance enhancements.

10. Security Enhancements: Implementing additional security measures like a web application firewall and regular audits can protect against vulnerabilities and ensure data integrity.

By focusing on these key areas, the website can achieve enhanced performance, security, and user satisfaction, ultimately leading to improved conversions and business success.

Summary

The website shows commendable performance in several areas, with a swift Time to Interactive of 2.1 seconds and a Speed Index of 0.8 seconds, suggesting that the visible content populates quickly. However, there are areas needing improvement, such as reducing unused JavaScript and CSS, implementing HTTPS, and optimising cache policies. By addressing these issues, the website can provide a faster and more secure user experience.

Performance Analysis

Time to Interactive

• • Current Status: 2.1 seconds
  • Insight: The page becomes fully interactive quickly, which is excellent for user engagement.

Speed Index

• • Current Status: 0.8 seconds
  • Insight: The page visibly populates content very rapidly, enhancing user perception of performance.

Max Potential First Input Delay

• • Current Status: 220 milliseconds
  • Insight: The maximum delay users might experience is minimal, suggesting efficient event handling.

Total Blocking Time

• • Current Status: 300 milliseconds
  • Insight: Some improvement is possible here to shorten the blocking time between the First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive.

Avoid Multiple Page Redirects

• • Potential Savings: 190 milliseconds
  • Recommendation: Minimise redirects to reduce page loading times, improving user experience.

Reduce Unused JavaScript

• • Potential Savings: 167 KiB
  • Recommendation: Audit and remove unnecessary JavaScript to enhance loading speed and reduce network activity.

Reduce Unused CSS

• • Potential Savings: 100 KiB
  • Recommendation: Eliminate unused CSS rules and defer non-essential styles to boost page load performance.

Serve Static Assets with an Efficient Cache Policy

• • Insight: 39 resources found
  • Recommendation: Implementing a long cache lifetime for static assets will speed up repeat visits.

Defer Offscreen Images

• • Potential Savings: 6 KiB
  • Recommendation: Implement lazy loading for images not immediately visible to reduce initial loading time.

Avoid an Excessive DOM Size

• • Current Status: 1,302 elements
  • Recommendation: Simplify the DOM structure to improve style calculation times and reduce layout reflows.

Avoid Serving Legacy JavaScript to Modern Browsers

• • Potential Savings: 35 KiB
  • Recommendation: Use modern JavaScript practices to avoid loading unnecessary polyfills for modern browsers.

Does Not Use HTTPS

• Insight: 1 insecure request found
• Recommendation: Transition to HTTPS to secure data transmission and meet modern web standards.

Key Recommendations

1. Optimise JavaScript and CSS: Remove unused JavaScript and CSS to lower page weight and improve load times.

2. Implement HTTPS: Secure the website by transitioning to HTTPS to protect user data and enable new web functionalities.

3. Improve Cache Policies: Use efficient caching strategies to speed up loading times for returning visitors.

4. Lazy Load Images: Defer loading of offscreen images to focus resources on above-the-fold content.

5. Simplify DOM Structure: Reducing the DOM size will enhance rendering performance and decrease resource consumption.

By focusing on these recommendations, the website can achieve improved performance, security, and user satisfaction.

Technical SEO Report for checksdirect.co.uk

Overall Feedback Summary

The technical SEO audit of checksdirect.co.uk reveals a relatively strong baseline with an on-page score of 92.72, indicating a well-optimised site. Key areas for improvement include addressing broken links, enhancing content quality, optimising title tags, and reinforcing image attributes. The site effectively utilises HTTPS and HTTP/2 protocols, and there are no significant issues with duplicate metadata. Corrective actions on the identified issues could enhance the overall user experience and search engine visibility.

Critical Issues and Recommendations

1. Broken Links

• • Impact: Broken links (9 identified) can lead to a poor user experience and negatively affect search engine crawling.
  • Fix: Conduct a link audit to identify and correct broken links, updating or redirecting them to relevant pages.

2. Duplicate Content

• • Impact: Duplicate content (5 instances) can dilute search engine rankings and confuse crawlers.
  • Fix: Implement canonical tags <link rel=”canonical”> or 301 redirects to consolidate content and specify preferred versions.

3. Title Tag Optimisation

• • Impact: Titles that are too long (9) or too short (2) can affect search visibility and user engagement.
  • Fix: Ensure title tags are concise and within 50-60 characters, incorporating primary keywords relevant to the content.

4. Low Content Rate

• • Impact: A low content rate (78 pages) may hinder the conveyance of value and relevance to search engines.
  • Fix: Enhance content depth and relevance to ensure it meets user intent and is comprehensive.

5. Missing Image Attributes

• • Impact: Missing alt attributes (84) and image titles (84) can impair accessibility and search engine understanding.
  • Fix: Add descriptive alt text and titles to images to improve accessibility and SEO.

Additional Observations

• SSL and HTTPS Implementation
• Status: The site has a valid SSL certificate and effectively forces HTTPS, enhancing security and trust.
• Canonicalisation and Redirects
• Status: Canonicalisation tests were not fully passed, and www redirect is not implemented.
• Recommendation: Establish consistent canonical tags and implement www to non-www (or vice versa) redirects as necessary.
• Server and Performance
• High Wait & Load Times: 36 pages have high waiting and loading times, which could affect user experience.
• Recommendation: Optimise server performance and resource loading to reduce wait times.
• Content and Meta Tags
• Duplicate Titles & Descriptions: No significant issues detected.
• Meta Refresh Redirect: No meta refresh redirects found, which is positive for SEO.
• SEO-Friendly URLs
• Status: URLs generally adhere to SEO best practices, though there is room for improvement in keyword usage and length consistency.
• Deprecated HTML Tags
• Finding: One page uses deprecated HTML tags.
• Recommendation: Update HTML to use modern tags, ensuring compliance with web standards.

Conclusion

While checksdirect.co.uk is largely compliant with SEO best practices, addressing the identified issues will further enhance its performance and visibility in search engine results. Continuous monitoring and optimisation are recommended to maintain and improve the site’s SEO health.

Summary

The website utilises a technology stack composed of Cloudflare for its CDN, MySQL as its database, and WordPress as its CMS and blogging platform. PHP is the primary programming language used. CookieYes ensures cookie compliance, and Google Tag Manager is employed for analytics management. Font Awesome is used for font scripts. Recommendations for improvements include enhancing security measures, optimising performance, considering modern programming language enhancements, and ensuring the website remains up-to-date with the latest WordPress updates and plugin versions.

Detailed Assessment

Servers

• • Content Delivery Network (CDN): The website uses Cloudflare, which is a strong choice for a CDN due to its robust security features and global reach. It provides performance enhancements such as caching and DDoS protection.
  • Databases: The use of MySQL is common and effective for WordPress websites. However, regular maintenance and optimisation of the database are recommended to ensure efficient performance and quick load times.

Privacy

• • Cookie Compliance: CookieYes is used for managing cookie consent. This tool is efficient for ensuring GDPR compliance, but regular reviews of cookie policy and consent management practices are recommended to adapt to any new regulations.

Web Development

• • Font Scripts: Font Awesome is utilised for iconography. This is a versatile tool, but ensure it’s implemented correctly to prevent any potential performance issues due to large library loads.
  • Programming Languages: PHP is the primary language, which is suitable for WordPress. However, ensure the PHP version is kept up-to-date to benefit from the latest security patches and performance improvements.

Analytics

• • Tag Managers: Google Tag Manager is a flexible way to manage analytics and tracking. Regularly audit your tags to ensure they are necessary and not impacting page load times adversely.

Content

• Content Management System (CMS): WordPress is a highly popular and flexible CMS, ideal for blogging and content-heavy sites. To maintain security and performance, it is crucial to keep WordPress core, themes, and plugins updated.
• Blogs: As the website also uses WordPress for blogging, it’s important to manage content effectively, employing categories and tags judiciously to enhance user experience and SEO.

Recommendations

1. Security Enhancements: Implement additional security measures such as a web application firewall (WAF) and regular security audits to protect against vulnerabilities. Consider using security plugins that offer features like two-factor authentication and regular backups.

2. Performance Optimisation: Consider using caching plugins specifically designed for WordPress to improve load times. Regularly test the website’s performance and address any issues related to large file sizes or slow server response times.

3. Database Management: Periodically optimise the MySQL database by cleaning up old data and ensuring efficient indexing. This helps in maintaining fast query responses and overall site performance.

4. Programming Enhancements: Evaluate the potential of integrating modern programming practices or languages, like JavaScript frameworks (e.g., React) for enhanced interactive features if needed.

5. Regular Updates: Ensure that all software components, including WordPress, plugins, and server-side applications, are updated to their latest versions to minimise security risks and improve functionality.

By addressing these areas, the website can enhance its security, performance, and user experience, ensuring it remains competitive and reliable.

Summary

The analysis reveals a strong SEO performance with a notable number of keywords ranking in top positions. The focus on high search volume keywords such as “checks” significantly contributes to the estimated traffic value (ETV) of approximately 45,728. Despite the success, there is room for improvement in keywords ranking beyond the top 10 positions and in increasing average competition levels.

Rankings

• • Total Ranked Keywords: 2,111
  • Position 1 Keywords: 11
  • Position 2-3 Keywords: 27
  • Position 4-10 Keywords: 143
  • Position 11-20 Keywords: 250
  • Position 21-50 Keywords: 1,048
  • Position 50+ Keywords: 632

The data indicates strong rankings for several keywords with 11 keywords holding the top position, suggesting effective SEO strategies. However, a significant number of keywords are ranked beyond position 10, indicating potential areas for improvement.

Keywords

• Highest Search Volume Keyword: “checks” with a search volume of 33,100.
• Top Ranked Keyword: “checks”
• Keywords with CPC > $1: 85

The keyword strategy effectively targets high search volume terms, particularly focusing on variations of “checks.” There is a successful capture of high-value keywords, which are crucial for driving quality traffic and conversions.

Backlinks

While the data provided does not include backlink information, the success in achieving top positions for several keywords implies a potentially strong backlink profile. Building and maintaining high-quality backlinks would further enhance SEO performance.

Strategies

1. Content Optimisation: Continue optimising content for high search volume keywords while improving content for keywords currently ranked beyond the top 10 positions.
2. Backlink Building: Strengthen backlink strategies to support keywords that are not yet in the top positions.
3. Competitive Analysis: Regularly analyse competitors to identify successful strategies and gaps that can be exploited.
4. Long-Tail Keywords: Target more long-tail keywords to capture niche traffic and improve overall search visibility.

Conclusion

The SEO strategy is largely effective, with a strong presence for high search volume keywords and a substantial ETV. To further strengthen SEO performance, focus should be placed on elevating the rankings of keywords currently positioned between 11-50 and increasing keyword competition levels. Regular monitoring and adaptation of SEO strategies will be essential in maintaining and improving search engine rankings.