Why design belongs in an audit
Design is easy to treat as a matter of taste, separate from search. In practice, many design choices decide whether a visitor can find, read and use a page, and search engines generally aim to surface pages that people find useful. Nobody can promise that a cleaner design will lift rankings, but a confusing layout can make good content harder to use and harder for crawlers to interpret. An audit is a good moment to look at it deliberately.
The goal of a design evaluation is not to decide whether a site is beautiful. It is to find the places where layout, navigation, text or mobile display get in the way of the page’s purpose. Keep that purpose in mind for each page you look at: read an article, compare products, find an address, send a message.
Start with a first-visit test
Open a page you have not looked at recently, ideally one that real visitors land on. Give yourself about five seconds, then look away and answer three questions from memory:
- What is this page about?
- What is the main thing I am supposed to do here?
- Where would I go next?
If you cannot answer, a new visitor probably cannot either. Write down what was unclear, not how you would fix it. Doing this on a handful of page types (home page, a category or topic page, an article or product page, a contact page) tells you more than staring at one page for an hour.
Layout and visual hierarchy
Layout is about where things sit and what draws the eye first. Check the following during a review:
- One clear main element. The page’s main heading and main content should be obvious. If the eye lands first on a banner, a pop-up or an advertisement, the page’s purpose is being crowded out.
- Content above the fold. On a typical laptop and phone screen, the first view should show real content, not only a large logo, a slider or empty space.
- Consistent templates. Pages of the same type should look and behave alike. Inconsistency makes a site feel unreliable and makes later maintenance harder.
- Breathing room. Dense blocks of text, tight spacing and many competing colors tire readers. White space is not wasted space.
- Ads and widgets. Anything that pushes content around as it loads, or sits on top of it, deserves a note. Layout shifts are covered in more depth in the material on Core Web Vitals.
A related point is the order of the page in its underlying code. A layout that looks fine can still be built with headings out of order or with text locked in images. Checking heading structure on a few pages is a quick way to confirm that the visual hierarchy matches the structural one.
Navigation
Navigation is how people, and crawlers following links, move through the site. When you test it, behave like a visitor with a goal rather than a reviewer clicking everything.
- Can you reach the main sections from the home page in one click?
- Do menu labels use words that visitors would use, not internal jargon?
- Does the menu stay the same on every page, or does it change unpredictably?
- On a deep page, can you tell where you are and get back up a level? Breadcrumb navigation helps here, particularly on sites with many layers.
- Does the site have a working search or a clear way to find things when the menu is not enough?
Also notice how many clicks it takes to reach your most important pages. Pages buried many levels down tend to be visited less and discovered more slowly, which is the problem described under click depth.
Menus that are crowded, nested several levels deep, or that open only on hover are common trouble spots, especially on touch screens. Specific fixes are covered in the article on optimizing design for evaluation; during the audit stage you only need to record where the problems are.
Readability
Readable text is basic, but it is often neglected. Check:
- Font size. Body text that is small on a phone forces zooming. Many sites use around 16 pixels or larger for body copy, though the right size depends on the typeface.
- Line length and spacing. Very long lines across a wide screen are tiring. Reasonable line spacing and paragraph breaks help.
- Contrast. Light gray text on a white background, or text over a busy image, is a frequent problem. Color contrast is worth checking with a contrast checker rather than by eye alone.
- Plain structure. Descriptive headings, short paragraphs and lists where content is a list let readers scan. Writing in plain language matters as much as how the text looks.
- Text in images. Important words that exist only inside a picture cannot be selected, resized or read aloud by assistive technology, and may be missed by search engines.
Mobile display
Many visitors use phones, and search engines have for years evaluated sites with mobile layouts in mind. Do not rely on shrinking your desktop browser window; that is a rough guide only. Where possible, view pages on at least one real phone and one tablet, as described in the notes on device testing.
On a phone, look for:
- Content that fits the screen width without sideways scrolling.
- Buttons and links that are large enough and spaced far enough apart to tap accurately.
- Text that is readable without pinching.
- Menus that open, close and scroll properly.
- Forms that bring up the right keyboard and are easy to complete.
- Pop-ups that cover the page and are hard to dismiss.
A site built with responsive design usually adapts better than one with a separate mobile version, but either approach needs checking page by page, since a template that works on the home page can still break on a long table or an embedded video.
Recording what you find
Keep notes simple: the page, what you saw, how it affected the task, and a rough severity. Screenshots are useful, and so is a note of which device and browser you used. Avoid recommending fixes while you are still observing; mixing the two tends to make notes less accurate.
Afterward, sort findings by how much they stand between the visitor and the page’s purpose. A broken menu on every page matters more than slightly tight spacing on one article. If you need a method for ordering the work, fix prioritization covers weighing effort against impact.
What design evaluation cannot tell you
A visual review shows what you can see. It does not measure speed, show how pages are crawled, or reveal what real visitors experience over time. Pair it with speed testing and with analytics and search reports. Your own opinions are also one data point: if possible, ask someone unfamiliar with the site to try a task while you watch silently. What they struggle with is often different from what you expected.
Design findings are most useful when they are specific, tied to a page and a task, and checked again after changes are made.