What is technical quality?
At WP-Ensure we use the phrase “technical quality” to mean how well your site stands up to different criteria. The factors below are considered when assessing websites and doing security audits.
Security Factors
How well your website is protected against external threats? Is there DDoS protection in place? Do you have a Web Access Firewall (WAF) protecting your site or can bots directly access your server? When they get to your server, does your server recognise bad bots? How many login attempts can a brute force attack try before the server blocks them? Is there monitoring or logging installed on the site? Is your WordPress version leaking out in the code? Are there any dangerous plugins installed that can be sniffed out from the outside?
Critical Response
How quickly can backups be restored should the worst happen on your site? How quickly can your web host or developers react to downtime? What kind of alerts are in place if the site goes down? Who is monitoring the alerts?
Code
There’s a huge difference between custom-coded themes and ready-made purchased themes. Your type of theme and which plugins are installed can improve or degrade your technical quality. How long will your theme be maintained? How old is the site? What version of PHP is it running on? In the case of ready-made themes, you can also ask: How long will this theme last? Many ready-made themes have a shelf-life of around six months.
If you have a custom-coded solution, is it being actively maintained by your developer? When was the last time it was updated? Does it use any libraries that are risky?
Speed
How quickly does your site load? How quickly does it load on mobile? Are the images optimised? Are the scripts and CSS optimised to make the site load as quickly as possible? Are you using a CDN for sharing images? How well is caching working?
Search Engine Optimization
Does your site have a sitemap.xml? Is Google Console installed? Are there OG keywords and descriptions on all pages? Are the titles correct and SEO-friendly? Are the URLs SEO-friendly? Is robots.txt blocking something it shouldn’t, or revealing more than it should? Is your sitemap too long or disorganized?
In Conclusion
As you can see there are a lot of factors you can assess when auditing a website. These affect speed, security, usability, and how well search engines index your site and give rankings. These are all elements we take seriously and involve in our monthly reporting system to give you the best tools to improve your site.
