Not every website is built to rank well in Google. That’s where website audits come in: they find the weak points that Google knows, but doesn’t tell you. (Unless you ask nicely.)

Website audits should only be done by web design firms whose own websites rank well.

That’s how you know a web design company can conduct a successful audit. If they’ve built their site to rank well, you know they can do it for your website.

How do you know if a web design company ranks well? Ask them what keywords they rank for then Google those keywords yourself. To see how we rank, Google these phrases:

• Award-winning Ohio web design company
• Which Ohio web design companies create home builder websites?
• What Ohio web design companies create plastic surgeon websites?

Of course, there’s a lot of factors that go in to having a website capable of ranking well.

If it were simple everyone would be ranking well.

One of the recent website audits we’ve done uncovered quite a few issues that were unknown to the client. Following is a list of the first few sections we had in our report. (We wouldn’t want to bore you with all the sections!)

PHP Version

What we found: PHP was out of date and has since been updated. PHP 8.1 reached end-of-life in December 2025 and no longer receives security patches.

What needs to happen: Confirm the site is now on PHP 8.2 or 8.3 (the current recommended version at the time of the audit). This can be verified and changed in the WPEngine dashboard.

Plugins

What we found: Plugins were updated as part of the pre-audit fixes. However, the site has accumulated plugins over the years — some may be inactive, redundant, or no longer maintained by their developers.

What needs to happen: Audit every installed plugin. Delete anything inactive — deactivated plugins that sit on the server are a security risk. Flag any plugin that hasn’t been updated by its developer in over a year, and replace it with a maintained alternative if it is still being used.

Performance

What we found: The site is image-heavy, which is appropriate for the brand, but it means performance requires active management. The homepage also includes an embedded video.

What needs to happen:

• Run baseline tests using Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and GTmetrix. Document mobile and desktop scores for the homepage and at least one case study page. A score of 90+ is good; 50–89 needs work; below 50 is poor (see chart).
• Optimize all current images. We’re hoping we can use a plugin to help retroactively fix all the huge image sizes. What the plugin can’t do, we will have to do manually. Any photos that were uploaded as PNG’s, will need to be manually changed to JPG’s.
• Write image guidelines and rules throughout the site. This will keep the image size and type issues from happening in the future.
• Evaluate the homepage video size. Right now it is about 24.5 MB. That is pretty good, but we would like to try and get it under 20 MB’s.
• Clean the database. WordPress accumulates bloat over time — old revisions, trashed content, and cached data. A plugin like WP-Optimize can clean this up safely.

Performance Grade:

Your “D” grade above is rough, but we can help you out. The biggest improvements will come when we fix all of your images sizes. After that we will need to dig deeper and remove unwanted Javascript, and other unnecessary code.

We will identify all of your major issues when it comes to loading using this report as a guide. Because your site is so image heavy, we cannot guarantee a perfect A+ grade, but we can certainly make huge improvements.

This process not only includes evaluations on desktops, but also how your site loads on mobile or any other handheld devices.

Website audits area important periodically.

Even our website, which we  meticulously maintain, has had issues over the years. So we even do it for ourselves periodically.

If we didn’t, our Google rankings would suffer, too.

If you want to talk about how a website audit can hep your company, drop us a line. Take the first step to getting your website to start showing up well in Google’s search results.