Umbraco Website Audit

Every Umbraco website is unique. The flexible nature of the software allows tons of leeway in terms of how any given use-case is implemented. This is a wonderful advantage of the system for developers; however, it can also allow the creation of sites which don’t have the best architecture for your needs going forward.

In many years of working with Umbraco, I have had the opportunity to look closely at numerous sites. Most sites created by reputable development agencies are in reasonably good shape, but some I have seen have made it immediately obvious that the developers who created it had never used Umbraco before.

If the site is working as expected, this might not really matter to you, but if you are struggling with a difficult-to-use back-office, overly complicated content update procedures, poor performance, or strange bugs – the underlying structure might be the cause.

If you plan to add some new features to your site, or change the way some pages are working, the first step is to understand how the system is structured right now, in order to determine the best way to make those changes.

The simple solution is an Umbraco Website Audit.

An audit will give you invaluable information about how your site is constructed and can answer questions like:

• Is this the most efficient architecture for our needs?
• Would it be safe to perform an upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco?
• What is the best way to add features we now desire?
• Can we retrofit the existing site to match our new branding? Or should we do a rebuild?

I offer two versions of the Audit service:

Back-office Only Audit

If you have a simple setup without any external custom code, or if you only have access to the back-office of Umbraco (via an Umbraco login), this is the Audit for you.

The Audit Report will include:

• Information about the DataTypes in use, how many are custom, etc.
• An examination of the DocumentTypes and Content tree – whether the architecture is efficient, and there is the right quantity and structure of Types for the existing site features
• A review of the Templates, and whether they are nested appropriately
• An inventory of installed Packages
• An analysis of any potential trouble-spots in the site setup
• Additionally, if you have any specific questions about the setup that you’d like answered, you can submit those prior to the Audit for inclusion in the report

Full Back-office + Source-code Audit

If you have access to the site’s full source-code, it can be reviewed for basic best-practices as well.

This Audit would include:

• Everything from the “Back-office Only Audit” (see above)
• Information about the code project / Visual Studio solution setup
• Analysis of the data-model access style used
• A look at custom controllers, services, helpers, indexers, integrations, etc. which are used on the site
• List of anything odd or extraneous which might require further investigation

Both Audits include a written report as well as a phone consultation to review the results.