What is a website audit?
A website audit is a structured review of how well a site does its actual job: being found by the right people, loading before they lose patience, making sense on the device they are holding, earning enough trust to be contacted, and making that contact easy. It is not a design critique or a list of technology preferences. Done properly, it ends with a short list of specific problems ranked by commercial impact.
The 12 checks below are the ones we run first on every site, grouped into the five jobs a website can fail at. You can work through them yourself with free tools in an hour or two, or run the free CRISP audit for a scored version of the same thinking in about a minute.
Checks 1 to 3: Search visibility, or can anyone find you?
Check 1: Is the site indexed? Search site:yourdomain.co.uk on Google. The results are the pages Google knows exist. If key service pages are missing, they are invisible to every searcher regardless of how good they are. Google's own Search Essentials documentation sets out the technical bar a page must meet to be indexed and shown.
Check 2: Does each page target a real search? Every important page should answer a question people actually type. Look at each service page's title tag and meta description: are they unique, specific, and written for the search they should win? A row of pages titled "Services | Company Name" is a row of pages competing with nothing and winning nothing.
Check 3: How do you actually appear? Search for your services the way a stranger would, without your brand name, on Google and in an AI assistant. Do you appear at all? Does the listing read like something worth clicking? AI answers are an increasingly common first impression, and we have written separately about what determines AI search visibility.
Checks 4 and 5: Speed, measured against Core Web Vitals
Check 4: Do your pages pass Core Web Vitals? Run your homepage and top service pages through PageSpeed Insights. Google's published thresholds for good performance are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift below 0.1. These are not aspirational targets; they are the line between a page that holds attention and one that sheds it, and they feed into rankings.
Check 5: What is making it slow? The same report tells you. The usual suspects, in order of frequency: images uploaded at full camera resolution, scripts loading before content, and themes or plugins carrying features the site never uses. Distinguish the afternoon fixes (compressing images) from the structural ones (a platform that is slow at rest), because they belong in different budgets.
Checks 6 and 7: The experience on a phone, and the five-second test
Check 6: Complete an enquiry on your own phone. Not a quick scroll: the whole journey, from landing on a service page to submitting the form. Note every point where you zoom, mis-tap, fight the keyboard, or hesitate. For most service businesses the majority of first visits are mobile, and Google indexes the mobile version of your site as the primary one, so this experience is both the customer's first impression and the one Google grades.
Check 7: Run the five-second test. Show your homepage to someone who does not know the business, for five seconds, then ask what you do, who it is for, and what they should do next. All three answers should come back correct. If they do not, the site is asking visitors to work out what it will not say plainly, and most will not bother.
Checks 8 and 9: Trust, proof, and accessibility
Check 8: Review the proof. Testimonials should have names. Claims should have examples. Evidence should sit next to the decision point, on the service page near the call to action, not exiled to a page nobody visits. Anonymous praise and stock photography read as warnings, not reassurance, and their absence is one of the quietest ways a site loses enquiries it technically earned.
Check 9: Check basic accessibility. Text contrast, image alt text, keyboard navigation, visible focus states, and labels on form fields. The reference standard is WCAG 2.2. This is partly a legal and ethical matter, but it is also commercial: every accessibility failure excludes real potential customers, and several of them, like poor contrast and unlabelled buttons, degrade the experience for everyone.
Checks 10 to 12: The conversion path and measurement
Check 10: Count the steps to enquire. From any landing page, count the clicks and form fields between arriving and enquiring. Then challenge every one of them. Each unnecessary field and each extra page is a percentage of enquiries quietly surrendered. Name, email, message is a fair first ask; everything else can wait for the reply.
Check 11: Does every page have a next step? Visitors land everywhere: blog posts, service pages, location pages. Each page should offer an obvious action or an obvious route onwards. A page that answers its question and then just stops has done half its job and wasted the other half.
Check 12: Are conversions tracked? Form submissions, phone clicks, and bookings should be recorded as conversion events in your analytics. Without this, every question about what the website contributes, and every decision about what to fix next, is a guess. It is the last check on the list but the first thing to fix, because it makes every other fix measurable.
The full website audit checklist in one table
| # | Check | Free tool | Failing looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Site indexed | Google site: search | Key pages missing from results |
| 2 | Pages target real searches | Your own title tags | Duplicate or generic titles |
| 3 | Appearance in search and AI | Incognito search, AI assistant | Absent, or unrecognisable listing |
| 4 | Core Web Vitals pass | PageSpeed Insights | LCP over 2.5s, INP over 200ms, CLS over 0.1 |
| 5 | Heaviest assets identified | Same report | Multi-megabyte images, blocking scripts |
| 6 | Mobile enquiry end to end | Your own phone | Zooming, mis-taps, keyboard fights |
| 7 | Five-second clarity test | A stranger | Cannot say what you do or for whom |
| 8 | Proof near decisions | Your own service pages | Anonymous quotes, claims without examples |
| 9 | Basic accessibility | WCAG 2.2 quick checks | Low contrast, missing alt text, no focus states |
| 10 | Steps to enquire counted | Manual walk-through | Long forms, extra pages before contact |
| 11 | Next step on every page | Manual walk-through | Pages that end in nothing |
| 12 | Conversions tracked | Your analytics | No conversion events recorded |
What to do with the results
Resist the urge to fix things in the order you found them. Fix measurement first (check 12), so everything after it is provable. Then whatever blocks visibility (checks 1 to 3), because fixes to an invisible site help nobody. Then speed and mobile, then clarity and trust, then the conversion path. Two or three failed checks is normal; it tells you where the leak is, which is the entire point of an audit.
If you would rather have this done for you with a grade attached, the free CRISP audit scores your site in about a minute, and the full audit service turns the findings into a prioritised, costed plan. Either way, the checklist above is the honest version of what any audit worth paying for actually checks.
Save the date and result before changing anything, so the next check has a trustworthy baseline.
Frequently asked questions
Can I audit my website myself for free?
Yes. Every check in this list can be run with free tools: Google Search for indexing, PageSpeed Insights for speed, your own phone for mobile, and Google Search Console for search performance. What a professional audit adds is judgement about which findings matter commercially and in what order to fix them, which is where most self-audits stall.
How long does a website audit take?
Working through this checklist yourself takes an hour or two for a typical small business site. An automated scored audit, like Fresh & Crispy's free CRISP audit, takes about a minute and gives you a graded starting point. A full professional audit with prioritised recommendations typically takes days rather than hours, because the value is in the analysis, not the data collection.
What is the difference between an SEO audit and a website audit?
An SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, crawl, and rank your site. A full website audit includes that, but also checks what happens after the click: speed, mobile experience, clarity, trust, and whether visitors actually enquire. Ranking well while converting nobody is a common and expensive way to pass an SEO audit and still have a failing website.
How often should I audit my website?
A light pass quarterly, and a fuller audit after any significant change: a redesign, a platform move, new services, or a noticeable drop in enquiries or rankings. Websites drift, as plugins update, content accumulates, and speed decays, so a site that passed every check a year ago can quietly fail several today.