Website Audit Checklist: 12 Things to Check Before Paying Anyone
Before you pay anyone to audit, fix, or rebuild your website - including us - run through this checklist yourself. Every check is free, most take under two minutes, and together they'll tell you whether your site has real problems or you're about to buy a solution looking for one.
Speed (the money section)
1Load your site on your phone, on cellular data
Not on your office wifi where it's cached and flattering. Real customers meet your site on a phone with two bars.
How: airplane-mode your wifi off, open your site in a private/incognito tab, count seconds until you could actually tap something.
Red flag: anything over 3 seconds. Google's research says most visitors are gone by then.
2Get your Lighthouse performance score
Lighthouse is Google's own measurement tool - the same one that feeds its ranking signals, and the same one we use.
How: run your site through PageSpeed Insights (free), or our free audit which adds plain-English explanations of what each failure costs you.
Red flag: a mobile performance score under 60. Under 40 means the site is actively repelling customers.
3Check your image weight
Oversized images are the #1 cause of slow small-business sites - camera photos uploaded at full resolution and displayed at a fraction of it.
How: in PageSpeed Insights, look for "Serve images in next-gen formats" and "Properly size images". The wasted kilobytes are listed per file.
Red flag: more than a few hundred KB of listed image waste. We covered all seven speed killers in Why Is My Website So Slow?
Mobile (where your customers actually are)
4Try to complete your own contact flow on a phone
Find your phone number, tap it, fill the contact form, tap submit. You're testing whether a motivated customer can actually reach you.
How: do it honestly, one-handed, like a customer standing in a parking lot.
Red flag: pinch-zooming to tap anything, form fields that hide behind the keyboard, or a phone number that isn't tap-to-call.
5Rotate, scroll, and check for layout jumps
Content that shifts while loading causes mis-taps - customers hit an ad or the wrong button and leave annoyed. Google measures this (Cumulative Layout Shift) and ranks on it.
How: reload your homepage on your phone and watch whether buttons move while things load.
Red flag: you tap something and hit something else.
Google visibility
6The site: check
The 30-second test of whether Google has your site at all.
How: search Google for site:yourwebsite.com (no spaces). Pages should appear.
Red flag: nothing appears - your site is invisible to Google entirely. The causes and fixes are in Why Is My Website Not Showing Up on Google?
7Search for your service + your city
"Plumber rock hill sc", "dentist near me" from your part of town. This is the search that pays your bills.
How: use an incognito tab so your history doesn't flatter the results. Note who IS ranking - that's your real competition.
Red flag: you're not in the first two pages and not in the map results either.
8Read your page titles like a stranger
The title is the blue link text in Google results - your headline in the only ad that matters.
How: look at your browser tab, or check the title in the site: search results.
Red flag: "Home", "Welcome", or just your business name with no service or city. Google can't rank you for words that aren't there. See Title Tags & Meta Descriptions Explained for how to fix it.
9Check your Google Business Profile
For local searches, the map pack outranks every website. Your profile needs to exist, be claimed, and be complete.
How: search your business name on Google Maps. Check: correct hours, phone, website link, photos newer than three years, and whether you're answering reviews.
Red flag: unclaimed profile, or a competitor's category list is longer and more specific than yours. Full setup walkthrough: Google Business Profile Setup Guide.
Trust and basics
10The padlock
No HTTPS means browsers literally label your business "Not secure" next to your name.
How: look at the address bar. Also try typing your domain with http:// - it should redirect to https automatically.
Red flag: any page that shows "Not secure", ever.
11Click every link in your nav and footer
Broken links, empty pages, "coming soon" sections from 2022, and a copyright year three years stale all tell visitors nobody's home.
How: five minutes of honest clicking.
Red flag: any 404, and especially a dead link in the main navigation.
12Squint test for readability
Low-contrast gray-on-white text looks elegant in a design mockup and unreadable on a phone in sunlight - where your customers are.
How: take your phone outside, or just squint. Can you still read the text that's supposed to sell?
Red flag: thin, light-gray body text. Accessibility failures like this show up in Lighthouse too - they cost real customers, not just points.
What to do with your results
Count your red flags. Zero to one: your site is healthier than most - keep it maintained. Two to four: you have specific, fixable problems, and none of them require a rebuild. Five or more: your site is actively costing you customers every day, and the fixes will pay for themselves quickly.
Either way, the next step is the same: get the failures measured and prioritized, because fixing them in the wrong order wastes money. That's exactly what our free audit does - it runs Google's tooling against your site and tells you, in plain English, which problems are costing you the most. If you're deciding between fixing and rebuilding, read How Much Should a Small Business Website Cost? first.
None of this is a once-and-done check either - a clean result today doesn't mean a clean result in six months, since browser requirements, Google's ranking signals, and your own site content all keep moving. If you'd rather not remember to re-run these 12 checks yourself, that is exactly what a Care plan does automatically: a real re-audit every month with a before/after report, instead of relying on you to notice when something breaks.
Frequently asked questions
What is a website audit?
A structured check of everything that affects whether your site wins customers: speed, mobile experience, Google visibility, and trust signals. A good one names specific problems with evidence - not vague letter grades.
How much does a website audit cost?
Automated audits should be free - ours is. Paid manual audits run $300-1,500 and mostly make sense for large or complex sites. Never pay for an "audit" that's really a sales pitch with no measurable findings.
Can I audit my own website?
Yes - this checklist covers the fundamentals. What a self-audit can't give you is prioritization: which failure is actually costing you customers. That's what a measured audit adds.
What tools do professionals use?
Google Lighthouse is the core of nearly every professional audit, including ours. The tool matters less than the translation - raw output is written for developers, not owners.
The cheapest way to find out
Run the free audit below instead of counting red flags by hand. It checks all 12 items with Google's own tooling and emails you a plain-English report naming exactly what's wrong. If something needs fixing, it is a flat $149 for your fixable speed/image/SEO/broken-link issue, or $299 for everything, with before-and-after proof once it is done.