How to Audit a Website: A 5-Area Website Audit Checklist with Free Tools

Your site is live, but is it doing its job? Does it show up on Google, is it comfortable to use on a phone, does it persuade visitors to fill in the form? You find the answers by measuring, not guessing. A website audit is simply a systematic way of collecting them.

The good news is that a basic audit does not require paying an agency or having technical skills. With Google's free tools and the checklists in this article, you can work out most of your site's condition yourself. If you want a faster starting point, our free website audit tool, Site X-Ray, runs more than 40 checks across these five areas in about a minute and puts the most important problems in front of you.

What is a website audit, and who needs one?

A website audit assesses three things together: your site's technical health, its visibility in search engines and its ability to turn visitors into customers. An SEO audit alone shows only part of the picture. A site that ranks first on Google but loads slowly or has a broken form still brings in no business.

An audit is especially useful when:

• Enquiries from the site have dropped, or never arrived in the first place.
• You are thinking about a new site and want to know whether the current one really needs replacing.
• You are spending on ads but not getting conversions.
• You work with an agency and want to check their work independently.
• You want to see whether anything broke after a major design or platform change.

Before you start: define the goal and the yardstick

Before the audit, write down your site's main job in one sentence: "get quote requests", "sell online", "take direct bookings". You will judge every problem you find against that job. On a hotel website, for example, a booking button that does not show on mobile is far more urgent than a missing meta description on a blog post.

Next, open a spreadsheet or a simple document. Record each finding under four columns: the problem, which page, how important it is and how hard it is to fix. By the end of the audit, this note becomes your to-do list.

Finally, pick two or three competitor sites to compare against. Your own speed score on its own tells you little. Put it next to the competitors who appear for the same searches, and you see clearly where you are behind and where you are ahead. You can note everything visible from the outside for competitors too: speed, mobile usability, page structure and trust signals.

1. SEO audit: how does Google see your site?

The aim of an SEO audit is to make sure Google can find your site, understand it and match it to the right searches. The most important tool for this is Google Search Console.

• Indexing: In the Pages report in Search Console, are your important pages indexed? Is there a page in the "Not indexed" list that should not be there?
• Sitemap: Does a sitemap.xml file exist, has it been submitted to Search Console and does it show errors?
• robots.txt: Is there a rule accidentally blocking important sections?
• Titles and descriptions: Does every page have its own title tag and meta description? Duplicate titles are a warning sign.
• Heading structure: Does each page have a single H1, with subheadings in a logical order?
• Broken links and 404 pages: Are you still linking to pages that were deleted or moved?
• Structured data: Is there schema markup for information such as company details, products and FAQs, and is it error-free?
• Search performance: Which queries do you appear for, and which pages have a low click-through rate?

If you have a physical address, check local visibility too. When you search for your company name on Google, does your Business Profile appear, and do the address, phone number and opening hours match your website? Different details in different places leave both customers and Google unsure.

If SEO is new to you, reading our article what is SEO before working through this list will make it easier.

2. Speed audit: how quickly do your pages load?

Speed affects both the visitor experience and how Google assesses your pages. Run this part of the audit with PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.

• LCP: Does the main content appear within 2.5 seconds?
• INP: Does the page respond immediately when buttons and menus are tapped?
• CLS: Does content shift while the page loads?
• Images: Are there oversized images, images in older formats (JPEG/PNG) or images loaded larger than needed?
• Server response time: Is the first byte slow to arrive?
• Third-party code: Are there unused analytics, advertising or chat scripts?

Prioritise the mobile result and test not only the home page but your most visited pages as well. We explain how to fix what you find, with 12 methods, in our guide on how to speed up a website.

3. Security audit: are your site and visitors protected?

Security problems usually go unnoticed until something happens. That is why regular checks matter.

• HTTPS: Do all pages open over HTTPS, and do HTTP addresses redirect to HTTPS?
• SSL certificate: Is the certificate valid, and is it close to expiry? The Qualys SSL Labs test gives detailed information.
• Mixed content: Are any images or scripts loaded over HTTP on an HTTPS page?
• Security headers: Are HTTP headers such as HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options and Content-Security-Policy set?
• Software updates: Are the content management system, theme and plugins up to date?
• Blocklists: Are the Google Safe Browsing status page and the Security issues report in Search Console clean?
• Backups: When was the last backup taken, and has a restore ever been tested?

4. Mobile usability audit: does it really work on a phone?

Google assesses sites by their mobile version, and most of your visitors probably arrive on a phone. Test mobile usability not only with tools but on your own phone too.

• Is the viewport tag set, does the page fit the screen width, is there any horizontal scrolling?
• Can text be read without zooming?
• Are buttons and links large enough, and far enough apart, to tap comfortably with a finger?
• Does the menu open and close easily on mobile?
• Do pop-ups or the cookie banner cover the whole screen?
• Can forms be filled in on mobile, and does the phone field bring up a numeric keypad?
• Does tapping the phone number start a call?

Device mode in Chrome's developer tools and the Lighthouse report let you test different screen sizes from your computer. Still, the most realistic test is for someone on your team to go through a quote request or an order from start to finish on their own phone, on mobile data. Note every moment they get stuck, wait or tap the wrong thing; these are problems tools do not always catch.

5. Conversion and trust audit: why should visitors contact you?

A technically flawless site that does not get visitors to act is not doing its job. This is the hardest area to measure with tools; you have to look at the site through a visitor's eyes.

• Can a first-time visitor to the home page understand what you do within a few seconds?
• Does every page have a clear next step (get a quote, call, message on WhatsApp, book)?
• Does the contact form work? Send a test message and check that it actually arrives.
• Are trust signals such as references, project examples and customer reviews visible and current?
• Are company details, address and phone number clearly shown?
• Is there a privacy notice and cookie consent (KVKK in Türkiye, GDPR for EU and UK visitors)?
• Is an analytics tool installed, and are form submissions tracked as conversions?

For the full list of trust elements, use the checklist in our corporate website checklist.

Free website audit tools

All the tools below are free, and most are provided by Google itself.

If you are setting up Search Console for the first time, Google's Search Central getting started guide walks you through it step by step. If you would rather see a quick overview than run each tool separately, just enter your address in our free website audit tool and the full audit report is sent to your email.

How to prioritise your website audit findings

Finding dozens of problems in a first audit is completely normal, and there is no need to panic. Instead of tackling them all at once, assess each finding with two questions: how much does this problem affect the site's main job, and how hard is it to fix?

In practice the order is usually: first security and broken functions (forms, payments, bookings), then SEO issues that stop Google from seeing your pages, then speed and mobile usability, and finally improvements to content and trust signals.

How often should you repeat the audit?

A website audit is not a one-off job. Every new page, plugin and campaign can introduce new problems. For most businesses this rhythm is enough:

• Weekly: A quick look in Search Console for new alerts.
• Monthly: A basic check of speed, indexing and form tests.
• Once or twice a year: A detailed audit covering all five areas.
• After every major change: Straight after a new design, platform or domain change.

Running an audit is one thing; fixing the findings regularly is another. If your team does not have time for it, Fietto Creative's digital continuity service keeps SEO, speed and technical maintenance under review for you. To see where to start today, run a free audit of your site with Site X-Ray, and if you would like help reading the report, get in touch.

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