Website Audit Checklist: An Hour of Work, Real Fixes

Business owners rarely have time for a full website audit, but most real problems are visible to the naked eye within an hour. This checklist shows what to check without paid tools and what to do when something comes up broken. Work through the eight areas one by one, jotting down 2-3 things to fix in each.

Mobile speed

Most traffic to a business website comes from phones, not computers. A slow site on a weak connection means a visitor closing the tab before they even see the offer.

How to check: open your site on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off, on regular LTE. Count in your head how many seconds pass before you see the headline and can scroll. Then go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste in your site's address, and check the mobile score.

What to do if it's bad: the usual culprit is full-resolution, uncompressed photos straight from a camera. Ask someone technical to compress the images and turn on lazy loading (images load only once the user scrolls to them). The second common problem is too many WordPress plugins: each one adds its own script that has to be downloaded and run.

Offer clarity in 5 seconds

Close your eyes, open the homepage, count to five, and ask: does what's on screen tell you what this company does and for whom? If you have to scroll to figure that out, the site is losing customers before they even start.

How to check: ask someone outside the company (a neighbor, a friend, a family member) to look at the homepage for 5 seconds and describe in their own words what you do. If their answer matches what you meant, you're in good shape.

What to do if it's bad: the headline at the top of the page should say plainly what you do and for whom, not as a slogan. Instead of "Building the future," go with something like "Web design for local businesses in Austin." Below the headline, add one clarifying sentence and a button with a clear action, such as "Book a call" or "See our work."

Path to contact

A customer who wants to call or message shouldn't have to search for anything. What matters is how many clicks separate them from a phone number or a form.

How to check: open any subpage (not the homepage) and count the clicks needed to reach your contact details. Also check whether the phone number in the footer is clickable on mobile (it should open the dialer right away).

What to do if it's bad: put the phone number and email address in the site header (top bar) and in the footer, on every subpage. If you have a physical location, add a link to Google Maps. Consider a small contact button that stays visible while scrolling, especially on mobile.

Forms

A contact form that doesn't work, or is too long, is the most common silent lead loss. The business owner usually never finds out, because no one reports the error, the customer just gives up.

How to check: fill out the form yourself, with a real email address, and confirm the message actually reached you (check spam too). Do this on your phone as well: fields should be easy to fill in with one thumb.

What to do if it's bad: cut the form down to the essentials: name, contact info, message. Every extra field means fewer submissions. If emails land in spam, that's usually a mail server configuration issue, worth handing to someone technical instead of guessing.

Content and headlines

A site full of generic phrases ("comprehensive solutions," "personalized approach") says nothing about what sets you apart from competitors. Customers are looking for specifics: what exactly you do, for whom, and at what price.

How to check: read your homepage content out loud. If it sounds like something any company in your industry could have written, that's a sign it's missing specifics.

What to do if it's bad: replace generic phrases with examples: instead of "wide range of services," list your actual services with a short description. If you have completed projects, show them (even without a full case study, a photo and two sentences will do). While you're at it, it's worth looking at what a website actually costs: we have a separate post on how much a business website costs if you're planning a bigger rebuild.

SEO basics

This isn't about advanced optimization, just things that take literally a moment but affect how your site shows up in Google results.

How to check:

• Open the site and look at the browser tab: is the page title sensible and does it include your company name plus what you do?
• Right-click, "View page source," and search (Ctrl+F) for <h1. There should be exactly one H1 heading on the page.
• Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and see how many subpages are indexed.
• Check whether yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml shows a list of URLs (a 404 error means there's no sitemap).

What to do if it's bad: fill in page titles and meta descriptions for every important subpage, this can usually be done yourself in the CMS panel. If there's no sitemap, flag it to whoever manages the site, it's a simple thing to generate. It's worth revisiting these SEO basics once a quarter, since small things slip through easily as content keeps changing.

Security

A visitor who sees a "Your connection is not private" warning in their browser will leave immediately. It's also a signal to Google that something is wrong.

How to check: look at the address bar, there should be a padlock and an address starting with https, not http. Also check whether the site runs on an up-to-date CMS version: if it's WordPress, the admin panel shows whether updates are available for the core, theme, and plugins.

What to do if it's bad: an SSL certificate (that padlock) is essentially free and standard today, not having one is a hosting oversight, report it to your provider. Plan CMS and plugin updates as a recurring task, ideally once a month, and ideally before a dozen of them pile up at once, since that's when the risk of conflicts grows.

Analytics and accessibility

Without analytics, you don't know how many people even visit your site or where they come from. Without basic accessibility, you lose part of your audience and hurt your SEO in the process.

How to check: view the page source and search for gtag or analytics to see whether any tracking tool is set up at all. For accessibility: check whether text has enough contrast against the background (light gray text on a white background is a classic mistake) and whether images have alt descriptions (look for the alt attribute in the source code).

What to do if it's bad: set up a Google Analytics account or a simpler alternative and have someone technical implement it, it's a matter of one script. Fix contrast by darkening the text against the background. Alt descriptions for images can usually be added yourself in the CMS panel, an hour's work while you're reviewing content anyway.

Frequently asked questions

Will this audit replace a professional website review?

No, but it will catch most of the basic problems that cost you real customers. A professional website audit additionally checks things invisible to the naked eye: data structure, server performance under load, and the site's code from a technical SEO standpoint.

How often should I run this check myself?

Once a quarter is enough, unless you've recently changed a lot of content or gotten signals from customers about problems with the site, in which case check right away.

What if I don't have anyone technical to make the fixes?

Some things (text, page titles, images) can be fixed yourself in the CMS panel. The rest (SSL, sitemap, performance) needs someone who knows the site's code, it's worth having that person on retainer or on call.

The site is old and has a lot of problems at once, what should I fix first?

Start with what affects the most visitors: mobile speed and offer clarity. Security and SEO can be improved gradually, but if there are genuinely a lot of problems, it's usually cheaper to rebuild the site from scratch than to patch the old one.

If you've gone through this list and see more red flags than green ones, we're happy to help sort it out: we do audits and rebuilds for companies that don't have the time or resources to handle it themselves. See how we work at DOPEST.studio.