⚡ Summary
A website audit checks four areas: speed, technical health, trust and security, content. You can cover half of it yourself, for free, in twenty minutes. The rest only shows up in a deeper pass. The value of an audit isn't the length of the problem list — it's the order you fix things in.
The site seems to work, but enquiries are thin. Or traffic used to be there and quietly drifted down. Or there's just a feeling that something is off and no way to put a finger on it. That's what an audit is for: turning a feeling into a list of specific items.
What a website audit actually is
Nobody is standing over your homepage pronouncing the design nice. It's a check across areas, each with its own tools and its own pass criteria.
Four areas cover almost everything that can be wrong:
- Speed. How many seconds a visitor stares at an empty screen before the thing they came for appears.
- Technical health. Whether search engines can see the site, whether links are broken, whether the mobile version works, whether pages are duplicated across several addresses.
- Trust and security. Certificate, real contacts, legal pages — everything a stranger uses to decide whether it's safe to pay you.
- Content and structure. Whether the copy answers the question people arrive with, and whether they can find it in two clicks.
When an audit is genuinely worth doing
Not once a year as a ritual, but for a specific reason. Traffic dropped and you don't know why. Visitor numbers held steady but enquiries fell. You inherited the site from a previous contractor and have no idea what's inside. Or you're about to spend money on ads and want to know where exactly you'll be sending people.
That last one is the expensive one to skip. Advertising into a site that takes seven seconds to load is paid traffic walking straight to a competitor.
What you can check yourself in twenty minutes
Most of the basics are visible for free and without special knowledge. Free tools that check website speed, mobile rendering and indexation cover most of the surface, and they cost twenty minutes. Here's how to check a website with what you already have.
Speed
Google's PageSpeed Insights — the website test most people start with. Paste the address, get a score for mobile and desktop separately. Don't read the headline number — read the seconds: how long until the main block of the page appears. Past three, people start closing the tab before it arrives. We went through this on our own site, where it was 9.3 seconds.
The mobile version
Open the site on your actual phone, not in a browser's emulation mode. Look for simple things: whether you have to pinch to read the text, whether anything runs off the right edge, whether buttons can be hit with a thumb without aiming. More than half your visitors see this version, and it's usually the last one anyone checks.
Whether search engines can see you
Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. You'll get a rough list of the pages it knows about. If that comes back empty or suspiciously short, that's the heaviest finding available and the one to start with. A page that isn't indexed doesn't exist for search, however good it looks.
What a trustworthy site looks like
Trust is its own category. The useful move here is to look at your own site through the eyes of someone who has never heard of you and is deciding whether to send you money.
The checks people run are short and consistent:
- The padlock in the address bar. No certificate and the browser itself writes "Not secure" — a share of visitors leave without reading further.
- Real contacts. An email on your own domain, a contact form, a messenger — Telegram or LinkedIn. Some add Instagram or Threads on top, which is fine. The problem is having exactly one: a "write to us" form with no alternative reads like you'd rather not be reached.
- Legal pages. Privacy policy and terms. People do open them — less often than the guides claim, noticeably more often than owners assume.
- Signs of a living business. Dates, names, photos of real work. A site where you can't tell who stands behind it reads as temporary.
Checking someone else's site for phishing is a different job — run the address through Google Safe Browsing and similar services and they'll tell you whether it's on a blocklist. For your own site the more useful question is whether it looks like something a visitor would want to run through one of those services first.
Want to know what’s wrong with your site?
Send us the address — we’ll look at speed, the mobile version and indexation, and tell you what to fix first.
What only a deeper pass reveals
Past this point you need a paid website auditor, or a full website analysis done by hand. These are things free tools don't show, because finding them means crawling the whole site and cross-referencing what comes back.
- Indexation in detail. Not "how many pages does Google know" but which specific ones never made it in, and why. A regular finding: part of a catalog has been closed off to search engines by accident, for years.
- Duplicate addresses. One page reachable at three different URLs — with and without
www, with and without a trailing slash, and again throughindex.html. The search engine picks a main one on its own, often a different one from what you had in mind. - Broken links. Internal and outbound. You can't walk this by hand; it takes a crawler that visits every page and reports each failure.
- What is actually slowing things down. Not a vague "the images are heavy" but which specific script blocks rendering and for how many milliseconds. Sometimes the most expensive script turns out not to be yours — a counter or widget installed once and forgotten.
- Markup for search engines. Structured data, heading hierarchy, meta tags — what decides how your page looks in results, and whether it appears at all.
Separately: hosting and the domain — whether the certificate has expired, whether the registration is about to, whether the server holds up under a spike. It's the dull part, usually remembered right after the site goes down.
What an audit costs and what you get
Price follows scope: a five-page site and a two-hundred-page catalog are different amounts of work. But the deciding factor isn't price, it's the shape of the deliverable.
What should come out is not a forty-page document full of screenshots but a list of actions in priority order. What to fix first, what second, and what you can leave alone entirely. An audit that leaves you unsure where to start is money spent, however technically correct it is inside.
One more thing worth asking upfront: whether a re-check after the fixes is included. Without it there's no way to say whether anything helped.
What to do with the result
Three outcomes, all of them normal:
- Small fixes you handle yourself. Compress images, fill in meta tags, repair a few links. Half the list is usually this.
- A targeted fix by a contractor. One or two areas, most often speed or the mobile version. Limited scope, legible result.
- The conclusion that rebuilding is cheaper. It happens when a site is assembled so that every fix drags three new problems behind it. Unwelcome to hear, and sometimes the honest answer.
If the check makes clear the site needs ongoing care, that's website support — that article covers what continuous work looks like. And if the result points towards rebuilding, start from what website development costs, so you're comparing repair against a rebuild with numbers on the table.