Website audit checklist: how to audit your own site for free

Step 1: Decide what your website has to achieve

Before looking at colors or speed, write down in one sentence what you want a visitor to do: call you, message you on WhatsApp, request a quote, book or buy. That action is the yardstick for everything else: what helps it stays, what gets in the way goes.

Also write down how many inquiries your website brings in per month today, even roughly. Without that baseline, you won't know whether your changes worked.

Step 2: Run the five-second test

Show your homepage for five seconds to someone who doesn't know your business, then hide it. Ask three things: what do you sell, who is it for or where, and what should they do next.

Nielsen Norman Group explains that the first 10 seconds of a visit decide whether someone stays, and that your value proposition has to be clear within that window. If your volunteer hesitates, the first fix is the headline and the main button, not the whole design.

Step 3: Review it on a phone, like a customer

Google evaluates your site by its mobile version: that's the one it crawls, indexes and uses to rank you. So review it on your phone, on mobile data and in a private window, which is how many of your customers arrive.

Check that you can read without zooming, that the page doesn't slide sideways, that you hit every button on the first try (the WCAG 2.2 accessibility standard requires targets of at least 24 × 24 pixels), that the menu opens and closes properly and that typing a phone number into a form brings up the numeric keypad.

Step 4: Measure speed with PageSpeed Insights

Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), paste your address and look at the mobile tab. It's free and it's Google's. Focus on the three Core Web Vitals: the main content should appear in 2.5 seconds or less (LCP), the page should respond to a tap in 200 milliseconds or less (INP) and nothing should jump around while it loads (CLS of 0.1 or less).

It matters because every second counts: according to Google data, as mobile load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving rises by 32%. The usual culprits are uncompressed images, autoplay videos, too many plugins or third-party scripts and slow hosting.

Step 5: Make sure people can actually reach you

Test every path as if you were a customer: submit your own form and check that the message arrives (look in the spam folder too), tap your phone number to see whether it starts a call, tap the WhatsApp button to see whether it opens a chat with the right number, and make sure the email address shown is one you actually read.

It sounds obvious, but this step produces the most surprises: forms sending to an old inbox, buttons pointing to an old number, or links that stopped working after an update. A failure here cancels out everything else.

A website people can't contact you through is an expensive brochure.

Step 6: Look for trust signals

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know you and look for proof that you're real and do good work: an address or service area, real photos of the team and the work, recent reviews, licenses and the secure-connection padlock (HTTPS) next to your web address. Since 2018, Chrome has labeled pages that don't use HTTPS as "Not secure."

Reviews deserve special attention: according to BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 97% of U.S. consumers read reviews for local businesses and 74% look for reviews from the last three months. Showing your Google reviews, with a link to see them all, is one of the cheapest and most effective changes you can make.

Step 7: Check the SEO basics

Search Google for your business name, then for your main service plus your city (for example, "dentist in Coral Gables"), and see where you show up. Then check that every page has its own title and description, one clear main heading and copy that uses the words your customers search with.

Add your site to Google Search Console, which is free: it tells you which pages Google has indexed, which have errors and which searches you appear for. For the technical side without the hassle, run your site through our free SEO audit, which checks speed, tags and indexing in seconds.

Step 8: Check basic accessibility

Accessibility isn't only for people with disabilities: high-contrast text is easier to read in the sun, and larger type helps every customer with tired eyes. Run your site through WAVE (wave.webaim.org), a free tool from WebAIM, and focus on three things: text contrast, images without alt text and form fields without labels.

If errors show up, you're not alone: WebAIM's annual analysis found detectable accessibility failures on the vast majority of the world's most visited home pages, and low-contrast text on 83.9% of them (2026).

Step 9: See what people actually do

What your visitors do matters more than what you think of your site. With Google Analytics, which is free, you can see which pages people land on, how long they stay and where they leave. If you also track taps on the WhatsApp button and phone number and form submissions as events, you'll know how many inquiries your site brings in and from which pages.

To go a step further, Microsoft Clarity, also free, records anonymous sessions and builds heatmaps (remember to disclose it in your cookie banner). Watching a visitor wander around without finding the contact button is more convincing than any report.

Step 10: Prioritize and build your fix list

Write down every problem you found and give it two scores: how much it affects whether people contact you (high, medium or low) and how much it costs to fix. Start with high impact and low effort: a form that never arrives, a headline nobody understands, oversized images or a missing WhatsApp button.

Run a full audit when you launch or redesign your site, and a lighter review every three to six months or as soon as inquiries drop. Websites don't break all at once; they decay with every plugin, every email change and every forgotten promotion.