A website audit means examining your site systematically to find what’s working, what’s driving visitors away and what’s costing you positions on Google. If your site has been live for more than six months without this kind of review, it’s very likely accumulating invisible problems that cost you visits, clients and credibility every week. Here’s how to do it yourself with free tools, what to check in each area, and when it makes more sense to hand the job to a professional.
What Is a Website Audit and Why Does It Matter?
A website audit is a structured examination of your site across four main areas: technical performance, search engine optimisation, user experience and security. The goal isn’t to produce a hundred-page report that ends up in a drawer, but to build a concrete, prioritised list of what needs fixing so that every correction has a measurable effect on your results.
Most site owners assume their website works fine because it loads when they type the address into their browser, but that impression is misleading. A site can display perfectly on your computer while being slow on mobile, poorly indexed by Google, riddled with broken links nobody sees, or vulnerable to attacks you won’t detect until the damage is done. A showcase website that loaded in two seconds at launch can easily take five seconds six months later if nobody checked in between, because images added since then weren’t compressed, an external script slowed everything down, or the hosting can’t handle the actual traffic.
The right time to audit your site is now, especially if any of these situations apply: your traffic is declining for no obvious reason, your contact forms aren’t generating enquiries anymore, competitors have overtaken you in search results, you’re considering a website redesign, or you simply haven’t looked under the hood since launch. Running an audit before a redesign also tells you exactly what to keep and what to rebuild, instead of starting from scratch and hoping the same mistakes won’t happen again.
How Do You Check Your Website’s Technical Performance?
Technical performance is the first area to examine because it affects everything else: a slow site drives visitors away, hurts your search rankings and degrades the user experience across the board, regardless of how good your content or design might be.
Start by opening PageSpeed Insights and entering the address of your homepage, then your three or four most visited pages. The tool gives you a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop versions, along with three metrics that Google uses directly to rank sites in its search results. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes the main element of the page to appear: aim for under 2.5 seconds. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability, those annoying jumps that happen when elements move during loading: aim for under 0.1. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly the page responds when a visitor clicks or taps something: aim for under 200 milliseconds. If any of these three metrics shows red, that’s a priority fix.
Then check mobile display using your actual phone, not just a simulator. Browse your site the way a potential client would: are the buttons large enough to tap without mistakes, can the text be read without zooming, do images adapt to the screen width, are the menus accessible? Google indexes and ranks your site based on its mobile version, not its desktop version, which means a site that’s fast on desktop but slow on phone still gets penalised. If you don’t yet have a site or you’re starting from scratch, this guide to creating a website covers the technical choices that prevent these problems from the start.
The most common performance issues are uncompressed images (often the single biggest factor in slow loading), CSS and JavaScript files that block rendering, fonts loaded without optimisation, and hosting that’s undersized for the site’s actual traffic. Each of these appears in the PageSpeed Insights report with an estimated gain in milliseconds if you fix it, which lets you prioritise the corrections that’ll have the most impact. A single uncompressed photograph can weigh more than the rest of the page combined, and converting your images to modern formats like AVIF or WebP while serving them at the right dimensions for each screen size often cuts loading time in half without any other change. If your hosting provider’s response time exceeds 600 milliseconds consistently, no amount of front-end optimisation will compensate for that bottleneck, and switching to a faster host is the first thing to consider.
How Do You Evaluate Your Website’s SEO?
Search engine optimisation determines whether your site appears when potential clients search for your services on Google, and an audit reveals the technical obstacles and content gaps preventing you from climbing in the results.
The first thing to check is indexation: does Google know about all your pages? Log into Google Search Console (it’s free, you just need to verify site ownership) and review the coverage report. It shows you how many pages are indexed, how many are excluded and why. If important pages on your site don’t appear as indexed, they’re invisible on Google regardless of their content quality. The most frequent causes are a forgotten noindex tag, an overly restrictive robots.txt file, a missing or misconfigured sitemap, or pages buried too deep in the site structure for Google to find. To understand how search ranking works, indexation is the essential starting point.
Then examine the structure of your pages individually. Each page should have a single main heading (H1 tag) containing the keyword that page should rank for, a page title (title tag) under 60 characters that makes people want to click, and a description (meta description) under 155 characters that summarises the content. Also verify that each page has a readable, descriptive URL rather than a string of numbers or incomprehensible technical parameters. These elements are what Google displays in its search results, and a poorly written title or missing description costs you clicks even when you’re ranking in a good position.
Internal link architecture matters as much as the content itself. Your main pages should be reachable within two or three clicks from the homepage, and pages covering related topics should link to each other using descriptive anchor text rather than “click here” or “learn more” phrases that tell nothing to Google or your visitors. A solid internal linking structure helps Google understand your site’s organisation and distributes ranking value across your pages, instead of concentrating it solely on the homepage. During your audit, open a few of your most important pages and count how many internal links point to them from other pages on your site: if the answer is zero or one, those pages are essentially orphaned in Google’s eyes, and adding relevant links from related content will often improve their ranking more than any other single change you could make.
How Do You Assess User Experience and Security?
User experience determines whether visitors who land on your site find what they’re looking for and take action, and security ensures nobody regrets having visited. These two areas are connected because an insecure site directly degrades the experience by displaying browser warnings and exposing visitor data.
To evaluate user experience, start by testing your conversion paths yourself, as if you were a visitor discovering your site for the first time. Fill out your contact form on mobile and verify the message actually arrives in your inbox. Follow the path a potential client would take to understand your services and get in touch, and note every friction point: a confusing menu, a button too small to tap on a phone, a long block of text with no structure, a page that doesn’t answer the question the visitor had when they arrived. Then have three or four people from your circle who don’t know your site do the same exercise, because you’re too accustomed to your own navigation to spot the obvious problems.
Check accessibility using the free WAVE tool (wave.webaim.org): it detects images without alt text, insufficient colour contrasts, forms without labels, and navigation elements that can’t be reached by keyboard. Web accessibility isn’t just a legal obligation: it improves the experience for all your visitors, including those browsing with a poor connection, a small screen, or in a noisy environment where they can’t play video with sound.
For security, check three things immediately. First, that your site uses HTTPS (the padlock in the address bar) with a valid, up-to-date certificate, because an expired certificate triggers a full-screen warning that drives away 100% of your visitors and tells Google that your site can’t be trusted. Second, that your HTTP security headers are properly configured using the free tool securityheaders.com, which gives you a grade from A+ to F and explains each missing header along with the exact configuration you need to add. The most critical headers to verify are Content-Security-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, and Strict-Transport-Security, because they prevent the most common types of attacks that target business websites. And third, that your site doesn’t contain known vulnerabilities, especially if you use a content management system like WordPress with plugins that haven’t been updated. Regular website maintenance is the best way to prevent these problems rather than discovering them during an audit.
Which Free Tools Can You Use for a Website Audit?
You don’t need expensive software to run a serious audit of your website, because Google provides the most reliable tools for free and other publishers offer free versions that cover the essentials.
| Tool | What it checks | What it tells you specifically |
|---|---|---|
| PageSpeed Insights | Performance, Core Web Vitals | Score out of 100, load times, elements to fix first |
| Google Search Console | Indexation, errors, queries | Indexed pages, crawl errors, keywords generating impressions |
| Google Mobile-Friendly Test | Mobile display | Whether your page is usable on phone, with detected issues |
| WAVE | Accessibility | Images without alt text, insufficient contrasts, poorly structured forms |
| Security Headers | HTTP security headers | Grade from A+ to F with explanation of each missing header |
| GTmetrix | Detailed performance | Loading waterfall, file sizes, server response time |
To go further without spending, Screaming Frog offers a free version that analyses up to 500 pages of your site and detects broken links, missing or duplicate titles, redirect chains, and structural problems. It’s the tool that SEO professionals use daily, and the free version is more than enough for an SMB website.
The most effective approach is to follow a precise order rather than jumping between tools randomly. Start with PageSpeed Insights on your five main pages and note the issues along with their estimated impact. Move to Google Search Console to check indexation and errors. Test mobile display on the same pages, check accessibility with WAVE and review security with Security Headers. And if you have time, run a Screaming Frog crawl to catch problems the other tools miss, such as redirect chains or orphan pages linked to nothing.
Record each problem in a simple spreadsheet with three columns: the problem, the affected page, and the priority (high if it impacts ranking or security, medium if it degrades the experience, low if it’s cosmetic). In one to two hours, you’ll have a concrete roadmap you can follow yourself or hand to a specialist, and that roadmap is worth more on its own than most paid audit reports that bury the essentials under decorative charts. If your audit reveals the need for significant changes, a structured website design brief will help you scope the project with the right partner.
Should You Audit Your Website Yourself or Hire a Professional?
The answer depends on three factors: your site’s size, your technical comfort level, and how much your online presence matters commercially.
A self-directed audit works well if your site has fewer than about thirty pages, if you’re comfortable with basic digital tools, and if you can set aside one to two hours per quarter. With the method and tools described above, you can identify and fix 80% of common issues yourself, especially oversized images, missing titles, broken links and mobile display problems. The exercise also teaches you to understand your site better and prevent future problems instead of just reacting to them.
A professional audit makes sense when your site is an important commercial tool that generates enquiries, sales or appointments, when it exceeds about fifty pages, when it uses complex technology (databases, client areas, online payments, multiple languages), or when a performance or ranking issue is visibly costing you clients. A professional brings an outside perspective, more powerful analysis tools, and most importantly the ability to prioritise fixes by return on investment, something free tools don’t do.
Professional audit fees vary considerably depending on the depth of work involved. A quick technical audit (performance, indexation, basic security) typically costs between CHF 500 and 1,500. A full-scope audit (technical, SEO, content, competitive analysis, detailed recommendations) usually falls between CHF 2,000 and 5,000 depending on the site’s size and complexity. In both cases, ask for a concrete deliverable with recommendations ranked by priority and an implementation timeline, not a hundred-page document that looks like an automated tool export. The real cost of a website includes this maintenance and these regular audits, and budgeting for them from the start avoids unpleasant surprises.
Whichever option you choose, consistency matters more than depth. A light audit every three months followed by immediate corrections protects your site better than an exhaustive audit once a year whose recommendations sit untouched because there’s never time to implement them.
