What a Website Audit Checks

A "free website audit" usually means an automated scan, a PDF covered in red warnings, and a sales call. The warnings are real and mostly trivial, and somebody manufactured the urgency.

So here’s the checklist we use. Most of it you can run in an afternoon with free tools. We publish it because a business that runs it and decides they’re fine was never going to hire us anyway.

1. Can search engines see it at all

• robots.txt: does it block anything important? A staging disallow left in place is catastrophic, and nobody notices it.
• noindex tags: search site:yourdomain.com and compare the count to your real page count.
• XML sitemap: does one exist, is it current, and is it submitted in Search Console?
• Canonical tags: does each page point at itself, or at a page that no longer exists?

This section catches the rare problems that kill a site outright. Everything else on the list comes in degrees, and this one is pass or fail.

2. Speed, on a phone

Run PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab for three or four representative pages. Include more than the homepage, since that’s usually the one page somebody optimised. Look at the field data if it’s available, because it comes from real visitors.

Then check the specifics: total page weight, largest image, number of scripts, server response time. Why small business websites get slow explains what each one means.

3. Mobile behaviour, tested on a real phone

Skip the responsive preview in the browser. Use a real phone, held in one hand, on cellular.

• Is the phone number tappable, and is it visible without scrolling?
• Do the menus work with a thumb?
• Does anything require horizontal scrolling?
• Is the body text readable without pinching?
• Can you complete the contact form one-handed?

Most small business traffic comes from phones now, and most small business sites were reviewed on a desktop by somebody sitting down.

4. Structure and content

Does every service you sell have its own page, or are they bullets on one page? Does each page have one h1 that describes what it’s about? Did a person write the titles and meta descriptions, or were they generated from the page name?

The question that matters most: read the first paragraph of your top three pages. Is it about the customer’s problem, or your company’s history?

Put the founding year somewhere below the first sentence.

5. Local signals

• Google Business Profile: category, hours, services, photos, recent reviews
• Name, address, and phone identical across site, profile, and major directories
• LocalBusiness structured data present and matching
• A real contact page with the address written as text, since search engines can’t read an address baked into an image

6. Conversion path

Walk it the way a customer would. Land on a service page from a search. Is the next step obvious? Test the contact form by submitting it, and confirm the email lands somewhere a person reads. Forms that email a departed employee are a common finding, and they cost real money without anyone noticing.

7. Security and the boring foundations

• HTTPS everywhere, with HTTP redirecting once and cleanly
• Platform and plugins current, or a documented reason they aren’t
• Backups that exist and have been restored at least once as a test
• Domain registration expiry, and who controls the domain
• Admin access: who has it, including people who left

8. What the analytics say, if anything

Is analytics installed once, or three times by three different people? Are form submissions and calls tracked as conversions? Can you answer "how many leads did the website produce last month" from the data you have?

More often than not the answer is no, which means every judgement about the site has been made on impressions.

What you get from ours

You get the findings in plain language, ranked by what they cost you, with the ones you can fix yourself marked. There’s no countdown timer, and the report is yours to keep whatever you decide.