What Is a Website Audit? Start With What You Want It to Do

What a website audit is

A website audit is a review of how well your site is doing its job. A typical one covers the technical side: how fast your pages load, whether the site works well on a phone, whether it's accessible, and whether search engines can find and understand it. Many also look at the content: is the message clear, and does each page lead people somewhere?

Start with the objective

Before any of that, it helps to know what you want the site to do. Maybe it's more booked consultations a month, more quote requests, or fewer phone calls asking the same questions. Then decide how you'll track it and what would count as success. It doesn't have to be precise. A rough objective is far better than none, because it's what every finding gets measured against.

Without an objective

Without an objective, an audit falls back on what can be measured without knowing your business: speed, mobile, accessibility, search basics. Those checks are genuinely useful, and worth fixing. But if you're asking how your website affects your business, they're probably only part of the answer.

With an objective, the audit follows the customer

With an objective, the audit can follow the people the site is for. Who are your main customers, and does each one have a clear way in? Does the site match how you actually sell? Does it reflect the quality of the work you do? Then it keeps going, past the site, into what happens after someone gets in touch: who picks up the enquiry, how quickly, and what happens next. Our website audit checklist walks through all of this in detail.

What you come away with

A useful audit doesn't end with a score. It ends with a short list of fixes, ranked by how much each one moves you toward your objective. If you want to put a rough dollar figure on what better search traffic is worth, we've written about putting a dollar value on search traffic. And if you'd rather walk through it together, tell us about your business.