What a Website Audit Actually Checks

The phrase "free website audit" usually means an automated scan, a PDF full of red warnings, and a sales call. The warnings are real and mostly trivial, and the urgency is manufactured.

So here is the actual checklist. It is not secret, and most of it you can run in an afternoon with free tools. We publish it because a business that runs it themselves and decides they are fine is not a customer we lost — they are a customer we never had.

1. Can search engines see it at all

• robots.txt — does it block anything important? A staging disallow left in place is catastrophic and invisible.
• noindex tags — search site:yourdomain.com and compare the count to your real page count.
• XML sitemap — does one exist, is it current, is it submitted in Search Console?
• Canonical tags — do pages point at themselves, or at a page that no longer exists?

This section catches the rare-but-fatal problems. Everything else on the list is a matter of degree; this one is binary.

2. Speed, on a phone

PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab, on three or four representative pages — not just the homepage, which is usually the one page somebody optimised. Look at the field data if it is available, because that is real visitors rather than a simulation.

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

3. Mobile behaviour, by actually using it

Not the responsive preview in a browser. 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 is mobile 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 the page is about? Are titles and meta descriptions written, or auto-generated from the page name?

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

The founding year belongs on the page. It does not belong in 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 as text, not baked into an image

6. Conversion path

Walk it as a customer would. Land on a service page from a search. Is it obvious what to do next? Test the contact form — actually submit it — and confirm the email arrives somewhere a person reads. Forms emailing a departed employee is a genuinely common finding and it costs real money silently.

7. Security and the boring foundations

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

8. What the analytics say — and whether they say 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 that exists?

The answer is no more often than yes, and it means every judgement about the site has been made on impressions.

What you get from ours

The findings in plain language, ranked by what they cost you rather than by severity colour, with the ones you can fix yourself marked as such. No countdown timer, and it is yours to keep whichever way you go.