Website optimisation: fix problems in the right order
[]Updated in 2026: The original post divided optimisation into on-page and off-page tactics. A useful audit starts with the failure that prevents a person or crawler completing the task.
The best website optimisation strategy is ordered diagnosis: make important pages accessible, clarify their purpose, improve the user journey, then strengthen evidence and reputation. Do not start with cosmetic scores.
1. Make the site accessible to people and crawlers
Check server errors, authentication, robots.txt, noindex, canonical URLs, redirects, JavaScript rendering and mobile behaviour. Important pages should be reachable through ordinary links and included in a clean sitemap.
Accessibility also means more than crawlability. Keyboard use, focus order, labels, contrast, alternatives for media and understandable errors affect whether people can complete the task.
2. Give each page a job
A page should answer a recognisable question or support a specific decision. Name the audience, provide the answer early, and remove sections that exist only to repeat keywords. If two pages do the same job, decide which one should be canonical and whether consolidation is safe.
3. Improve the journey
Watch representative users attempt the important action. Analytics can show where people leave; observation can show why. Fix unclear navigation, hidden costs, broken forms and unnecessary steps before polishing decoration.
Measure real-user performance with Core Web Vitals alongside your own conversion and abandonment data. Google defines the current metrics in its Core Web Vitals guidance, but a green report does not prove the proposition is clear.
4. Add evidence worth returning for
Show the work: original research, complete specifications, current prices, direct experience, clear authorship, limitations and useful sources. Then make that evidence discoverable to the organisations and communities for whom it matters.
Run the audit in this order because later work cannot rescue an inaccessible or purposeless page. Optimisation is not the accumulation of tips. It is removing the most consequential obstacle first, measuring the result, and repeating.
