What a life sciences website audit should uncover first

An audit is where a life sciences website redesign earns its scope. Done well, it tells you which problems are worth solving and which pages are quietly creating risk. Done as a checklist of broken links and page speed scores, it produces a report nobody acts on. The difference is what you choose to uncover first. We open every redesign by finding the issues that change the plan, not the ones that merely fill a spreadsheet.

Start with compliance exposure, not cosmetics

On a life sciences site the highest-cost findings are rarely visual. They are pages that make a claim the current evidence no longer supports, product language that drifted out of alignment with the approved indication, or missing safety information on a page that promotes a therapy. These are the findings that a regulatory reviewer, or a regulator, cares about, and they outrank any amount of design debt.

We also look at how the site handles data and consent. Tracking pixels firing before a visitor consents, analytics collecting more than the privacy policy discloses, and forms gathering personal data without a clear basis are all common and all consequential. An audit that surfaces these first lets the organization fix the exposure immediately, whether or not the full redesign proceeds.

Find the content that no longer matches the science

Science moves faster than websites. A study reads out, a publication lands, a product advances a phase, and the site keeps describing the world as it was eighteen months ago. The most useful thing an audit can do for a research-driven organization is catalog where the public site and the current science have diverged.

• Pipeline pages that list a program at a stage it has since passed.
• Publication lists that stop at a date well behind the latest output.
• Data and efficacy statements that predate a more recent readout.
• Team and leadership pages that no longer reflect who is actually there.

Each of these erodes credibility with the exact audience a life sciences website most needs to convince. We report them as content debt with an owner attached, because they are not design problems and a redesign alone will not keep them current.

Measure the site as the two audiences actually use it

A life science website redesign serves a scientific reader and a commercial reader at once, and an audit should evaluate the site through both lenses rather than averaging them. The scientific reader is hunting for evidence, methods, and primary sources. The commercial reader is evaluating fit, capability, and how to start a conversation. A page that satisfies one and frustrates the other is a finding, not a success.

We trace the real paths. Can a scientist reach a method or a publication in a reasonable number of steps. Can a procurement lead find capabilities, compliance posture, and a contact route without wading through science they did not come for. Where those paths collide is where the structure of the site for scientific and commercial audiences needs the most attention in the rebuild.

Check accessibility against a real standard

Accessibility is both an obligation and a quality signal, and it is cheap to assess and expensive to ignore. We audit against WCAG 2.1 AA as a concrete target rather than a vague aspiration, because a named standard produces findings a team can close. Color contrast failures, images without meaningful alternative text, forms that cannot be completed by keyboard, and content that relies on color alone to carry meaning are the recurring offenders. On a regulated site they also intersect with legal risk, which raises their priority.

Assess the technical foundation honestly

The last thing an audit should establish is whether the current platform can carry where the organization is going. This is a judgment about fit, not a verdict on the software. We look at how content is modeled, whether the pipeline and publications are structured data or hand-built pages, how review and publishing workflows function, and where the hosting and security posture stands. These findings feed directly into choosing the right technology for the redesign, and they keep that decision grounded in evidence rather than vendor preference.

Turn findings into a plan the organization will act on

An audit is only worth the redesign it informs. We rank findings by decision-relevance, separating what creates risk today, what undermines credibility, and what simply costs effort, so leadership can act on the urgent items before the full build is scoped. That ranking becomes the backbone of the project plan and keeps the redesign focused on the problems that mattered enough to start it.

The findings only translate cleanly into a build when the organization has already done the alignment work, which is why we treat aligning stakeholders before the redesign as the step that makes an audit actionable rather than academic. Our audits for partners such as Taconic Biosciences followed exactly this order, and a fuller view of how a specialist partner runs this phase sits in what to expect from a life science marketing agency.