A website audit is the difference between guessing why your site underperforms and knowing exactly which pages are costing you money. This guide gives you the full checklist, the process behind it, and the report structure that turns findings into a work plan.
What a website audit actually tells you
Most UK business owners commission an audit because traffic has dropped or enquiries have dried up, and they want someone to point at the cause. That framing is too narrow. A proper audit is a systematic inventory of every factor that affects whether a page can be found, loaded, understood and acted on. It answers three questions in order: can search engines reach and interpret this site, can a human use it on the device they actually own, and does the site ask for the sale in a way that a reasonable person would respond to. Skip any one of those and you get a report full of technical noise that no one can act on.
The distinction matters because the three layers fail in sequence. A page with a broken canonical tag will not rank no matter how good the copy is. A page that ranks but takes nine seconds to load on 4G will bounce before the copy is read. A page that ranks and loads fast but buries the phone number in the footer will get read and then abandoned. Auditing in that order stops you spending three weeks rewriting product descriptions on pages Google has never indexed.
The six pillars of a complete website audit
Technical SEO and crawlability
Whether search engines can reach, render and index your pages at all. This covers indexation status, canonical tags, redirect chains, XML sitemaps, robots.txt directives, structured data validity and HTTPS implementation. It is the layer with the highest ratio of catastrophic-but-invisible problems: a stray noindex tag can remove a page from search entirely while the page looks perfectly healthy in a browser.
On-page SEO and site structure
Whether each page communicates its topic clearly to both readers and crawlers. Title tags, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, internal linking, image alt text and URL structure all sit here. The most common failure on UK SMB sites is not missing tags, it is duplicate ones: twenty service pages sharing a single templated title, competing with each other for the same query.
Content quality and coverage
Whether the content answers the question the visitor arrived with, and whether you have coverage of the topics your buyers actually search for. This includes thin pages, outdated pages, duplicate pages and gaps where a competitor ranks and you have nothing. It also covers cannibalisation, where two of your own pages target the same phrase and split the signal between them.
Performance and Core Web Vitals
Whether the site loads quickly and behaves predictably while it loads. Google measures this through Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. Field data from real visitors matters more than lab scores, because a synthetic test on a fast connection will not reproduce what a customer sees on a phone in a car park.
UX, accessibility and conversion
Whether a real person can complete the task they came to do. Navigation clarity, form length, mobile tap targets, contrast ratios, keyboard operability and call-to-action placement all belong here. Accessibility is not a separate nicety: the same fixes that help screen reader users (clear labels, logical heading order, sufficient contrast) reliably lift conversion for everyone else.
Analytics, tracking and measurement
Whether you can trust the numbers you are about to make decisions with. Broken or duplicated analytics tags, unconfigured conversion events, missing Search Console verification and consent banners that block tracking entirely are all extremely common. An audit that does not verify measurement is an audit whose own baseline cannot be trusted.
How to audit a website: the step-by-step process
The order below is deliberate. Each step narrows the search space for the next one, so you spend your time on pages that matter rather than crawling every URL with equal attention.
- Establish the baseline. Pull the last 12 months from Google Analytics and Search Console before you change anything. Note traffic, conversions, top landing pages and top queries. Without a baseline you cannot prove the audit worked.
- Crawl the site. Run a full crawl to build a complete URL inventory. You are looking for the gap between pages that exist, pages that are crawlable and pages that are actually indexed.
- Reconcile crawl against index. Compare your crawl list with Search Console's Pages report. Every page in one list but not the other is a finding.
- Segment by commercial value. Tag each URL as revenue-driving, supporting, or dead weight. Audit depth should follow money, not alphabetical order.
- Run the technical checks on the full site, then the on-page and content checks on your commercial segment only.
- Measure performance with field data from the Core Web Vitals report, not just a one-off lab test.
- Walk the conversion path yourself on a real phone, on mobile data, as a first-time visitor who has never seen the site.
- Score and prioritise every finding by impact and effort, then write the fix list in that order.
The complete website audit checklist for 2026
Technical SEO checklist
- Site resolves on one canonical version only (HTTPS, with or without www, not both)
- Valid SSL certificate with no mixed-content warnings
- XML sitemap exists, contains only indexable 200-status URLs, and is submitted in Search Console
- robots.txt does not block CSS, JavaScript or any commercial page
- No unintended noindex tags on pages you want ranked
- Self-referencing canonical tags on all primary pages
- Redirect chains resolved to a single hop, no redirect loops
- Custom 404 page that routes visitors somewhere useful
- Structured data validates cleanly in Google's Rich Results Test
- Pagination and faceted navigation are not generating thousands of near-duplicate URLs
- Hreflang correct if you serve more than one country or language
On-page SEO checklist
- Every indexable page has a unique title tag, ideally under 60 characters
- Every indexable page has a unique meta description under roughly 155 characters
- Exactly one H1 per page, describing the page topic
- Heading hierarchy descends logically with no skipped levels
- No two pages target the same primary keyword
- Internal links use descriptive anchor text, not "click here" or a bare URL
- Important pages sit within three clicks of the homepage
- Images carry meaningful alt text, and decorative images carry empty alt attributes
- URLs are short, readable and free of session parameters
- Orphan pages (no internal links pointing at them) are identified and either linked or removed
Performance and Core Web Vitals checklist
- Largest Contentful Paint at or under 2.5 seconds for 75% of real visits
- Interaction to Next Paint at or under 200 milliseconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift at or under 0.1
- Images served in a modern format (WebP or AVIF) and sized to their display dimensions
- Explicit width and height on images and embeds to prevent layout shift
- Render-blocking CSS and JavaScript minimised or deferred
- Fonts preloaded and served with a sensible fallback rather than invisible text
- Third-party scripts audited: every tag manager container, chat widget and pixel justified or removed
- Caching and compression enabled at server or CDN level
Google documents the current thresholds and how each metric is measured in its Core Web Vitals reference, and PageSpeed Insights reports both field and lab data for any public URL.
UX, accessibility and conversion checklist
- Primary call to action visible without scrolling on a standard mobile viewport
- Phone number and enquiry route reachable from every page
- Forms ask for the minimum viable number of fields
- Form errors are described in text, not communicated by colour alone
- Tap targets at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels with adequate spacing
- Text contrast meets a 4.5:1 ratio against its background
- The full journey to enquiry is operable by keyboard alone
- Focus states are visible on every interactive element
- Page titles and link text make sense when read out of context
- Cookie banner does not obscure the primary action on mobile
The W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines set the international standard here, and the UK government service manual explains the Level AA requirements in plain terms. Level AA is the sensible target for a commercial site even where the public sector regulations do not apply to you directly.
Analytics and tracking checklist
- Analytics tag fires exactly once per page view, with no duplicate containers
- Conversion events are defined, firing, and matched to real business outcomes
- Search Console verified, with the correct property type and sitemap submitted
- Internal traffic and known bot traffic excluded from reporting
- Consent mode configured so that declining cookies does not silently zero your data
- Cross-domain tracking configured if checkout or booking sits on another domain
How to run a website content audit
A website content audit is the piece most owners skip, and it is usually where the fastest wins sit. Export every URL with its sessions, conversions, impressions and average position, then sort every page into one of four buckets.
- Keep and leave alone. Pages earning traffic and conversions. Do not touch them because you are bored of them.
- Improve. Pages ranking between positions 5 and 20 with impressions but weak click-through. These are the highest-return pages on the site, because they already have Google's confidence and need a better answer rather than a new one.
- Consolidate. Two or more pages competing for the same phrase. Merge the weaker into the stronger and redirect it, rather than leaving both to split the signal.
- Remove or redirect. Pages with no traffic, no links and no commercial purpose. Thin pages do not just fail to help, they dilute how a crawler assesses the rest of the site.
Run this against a full 12 months of data so that seasonal pages are not condemned on the strength of a quiet quarter. If you are rewriting rather than deleting, our guide to SEO copywriting covers how to improve a page without stripping out the phrases it already ranks for.
What a website audit report should contain
A findings list is not a report. If the deliverable does not tell someone what to do on Monday morning, it has failed, and this is where most cheap audits fall down: a 60-page PDF of automated tool output with no prioritisation and no owner.
A usable website audit report has six parts:
- Executive summary. Three to five sentences a non-technical director can read and act on, stating the commercial impact rather than the technical symptom.
- Scored findings. Every issue rated by impact and by effort, so that the high-impact, low-effort items are unambiguous.
- Evidence. The URL, the screenshot, the export or the tool output behind each finding, so the developer does not have to reproduce your work.
- The recommended fix. Specific enough to hand to a developer without a follow-up meeting.
- A sequenced roadmap. What happens in weeks one to two, weeks three to six and beyond, with dependencies made explicit.
- The measurement plan. Which metrics should move, by roughly how much, and by when. This is the part that lets you hold the work to account.
Free versus paid website audit tools
Free tools that cover most of the ground
Google Search Console is non-negotiable and gives you indexation, query data and Core Web Vitals field data straight from the source. PageSpeed Insights covers performance, Lighthouse (built into Chrome) covers performance and accessibility together, and the Rich Results Test validates structured data. Screaming Frog's free tier will crawl up to 500 URLs, which covers a large share of UK SMB sites outright. For most owners, these will surface the majority of what a paid audit finds.
Where paid tools earn their cost
Paid platforms buy you three things: scale beyond a few hundred URLs, competitive and backlink data you cannot get from your own properties, and scheduled monitoring so regressions surface within days rather than at the next audit. If your site is under a hundred pages and you audit twice a year, the free stack is genuinely sufficient. If you run an ecommerce catalogue in the thousands, the licence pays for itself in crawl time alone.
DIY audit versus paid website audit services
Run it yourself when the site is small, you have the time, and the goal is to find obvious breakage. The free tools above will find missing titles, broken links, slow pages and unindexed URLs, and none of that requires an agency.
Commission professional website audit services when the stakes or the complexity rise past that point: when traffic has fallen and you do not know why, when you are about to spend serious money on a redesign or a migration, when the site is large enough that findings need prioritising rather than just listing, or when an internal team has already tried and the numbers have not moved. The value in a paid audit is not the checklist, which you now have. It is the diagnosis: knowing which three of the eighty findings actually explain the revenue gap, and in what order to fix them.
Expect a genuine audit of a UK SMB site to run from a few hundred pounds for a focused technical review to several thousand for a full commercial audit of a large ecommerce site. Anything advertised as free is a lead-generation tool: useful as a starting signal, not a substitute for the work. For context on where audit spend sits against ongoing retainers, see our breakdown of what SEO costs in the UK, and if you are weighing up an agency at all, how to hire a web designer covers the questions worth asking first.
Our SEO services begin with exactly this audit process, and where findings point at structural problems rather than content ones, our web design team handles the rebuild.
How often should you audit your site?
A full audit once a year is the right cadence for most UK SMB sites, with a lighter quarterly check on indexation, Core Web Vitals and conversion tracking. Audit outside that schedule whenever something structural changes: a redesign, a platform migration, a domain change, a sudden ranking drop, or a core algorithm update that visibly moved your numbers. The quarterly check exists to catch regressions early, because most serious problems are not introduced by Google, they are introduced by a plugin update or a well-meaning content change on a Tuesday afternoon.
Two further reads if you are auditing an older site: the most common web design mistakes and how design decisions drive conversion rates both cover issues that audits surface repeatedly.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a website audit take?
A focused technical audit of a small site takes one to two days. A full commercial audit covering technical, content, performance, UX and analytics on a mid-sized site typically takes one to three weeks, most of which is analysis rather than crawling. Be sceptical of anything delivered within an hour, because that is an automated tool report with a cover page.
What is the difference between an SEO audit and a website audit?
An SEO audit examines only the factors affecting search visibility. A website audit is broader: it includes SEO but adds performance, accessibility, user experience, conversion and analytics. If your rankings are healthy but enquiries are not, an SEO audit will tell you very little and a full website audit will tell you a great deal.
Can I run a website audit using free tools only?
Yes, for most small sites. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse and a free-tier crawler will surface the majority of genuine issues. What free tools will not do is prioritise findings against your commercial goals or diagnose why several symptoms share one root cause, and that judgement is what you are actually paying for in a professional audit.
Can AI tools run a website audit for me?
AI is genuinely useful for parts of the job: summarising crawl exports, spotting patterns across hundreds of title tags, drafting the rewrite of a weak page. It is unreliable for the parts that matter most, because it cannot access your Search Console data, cannot see your field performance metrics, and will confidently assert problems that do not exist on your site. Use it to accelerate the analysis, not to replace the crawl and the data.
What is the most common issue website audits find on UK SMB sites?
Broken or misconfigured conversion tracking, by a clear margin. Site after site is making budget decisions on numbers that are double-counting, missing entirely, or being suppressed by a consent banner. The second most common is duplicate title tags across templated service pages, which quietly caps how many of those pages can rank. On paid social the usual culprit is browser-side tracking left to work alone, which our guide to the Meta Conversions API versus the Meta Pixel covers in detail.
Does Google Search Console replace the need for an audit?
No, though it is the single most valuable input to one. Search Console reports what Google has observed about pages it already knows about. It will not tell you about orphan pages it never found, will not assess your conversion path, will not check accessibility, and will not tell you which of its own reported issues actually matters commercially. It is the starting point of an audit, not a substitute for one.
