How To Audit Your Own Website

Most website problems are visible in an hour without any software. Here is the pass I would run before paying anyone to tell me the same thing.

Open it on your phone first

Most of your traffic is on a phone, and most websites are designed on a desktop. Look at your site on a phone before anything else.

Check the text is readable without zooming, the buttons are large enough to hit, nothing runs off the side of the screen, and the phone number is tappable.

If a form is painful to fill in on a phone, that is your conversion problem and nothing else matters until it is fixed.

Time the load

Open it on mobile data rather than your own wifi. Count how long until you can read something.

If it is more than about three seconds, a meaningful share of your visitors are gone before the page arrives. The usual culprits are enormous uncompressed images and a page loading half a dozen third-party scripts.

Read the first screen as a stranger

Cover everything below the fold. Can someone tell what you do, who it is for and what to do next?

If the first screen is a photo and a slogan, it is decoration. The first screen has one job: answer "am I in the right place".

Find the call to action

Look at your five most visited pages and find the next step on each one.

There should be one obvious action, repeated, and it should be visible without scrolling. Not five different options. Not a contact link buried in the footer.

Pages with no next step are the most common thing I find, and they are usually the pages getting the most traffic.

Fill in your own form

Actually do it. Submit it.

Does it arrive. Where does it go. Does anyone get notified. Does the person get a confirmation.

Broken forms are far more common than anyone believes, and nobody finds out because nobody tests them. A form that has been silently failing for months looks exactly like a business with no leads.

Check what a search result looks like

Search your business name on Google and look at what comes up.

The title and the description under it are what people actually read. If they say "Home | Untitled" or the description is a truncated sentence from the middle of the page, you are losing clicks you already earned.

Every page needs a title that says what it is and a description that gives someone a reason to click.

Look for the pages that do not exist

Most sites have one page per service and nothing else. That is a page for each of the things you sell, and nothing for the hundred questions people ask before they buy.

List the ten questions you answer on the phone every week. If there is no page on your site for any of them, that is where the traffic you are missing lives.

Check the basics that break silently

Broken links. Old prices. Staff who left. A copyright year from three years ago. A phone number you no longer use.

None of these are strategy, and all of them tell a visitor the business is not paying attention.

Ask one person who has never seen it

Sit someone down, give them a task, and watch without helping. "Find out how much this costs" or "book a call."

Where they hesitate is your problem. Not where you think it is.

What to do with the list

You will end up with about fifteen items. Fix the ones on the highest-traffic pages first, because that is where the same fix is worth the most.

Then run the whole pass again in three months. Websites decay quietly, and the audit is worth more as a habit than as a one-off.