What a website audit should actually tell you
Most free audits are a sales pitch with a score. Here is what a useful one covers, and the checks you can do yourself in ten minutes.
“Free website audit” usually means an automated report with a red score and a call to book a sales meeting. That is not useless, but it rarely tells a business owner what to do on Monday morning. A useful audit answers three questions: can people find you, do they trust you when they land, and is it easy for them to contact you?
1. Can people find you?
- Search for your trade and your town on a phone. Do you show up? Does your business listing?
- Does each page have a clear title that says what you do and where? Google’s own SEO starter guide is a plain-English reference for this.
- Is the site fast? Slow sites lose visitors before the page even appears. Paste your address into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights to see real numbers.
- Are your name, address and phone number the same everywhere they appear online? Google’s guidelines for business listings explain why this matters.
2. Do they trust you when they land?
In the first few seconds, a visitor should be able to tell:
- what you do
- who it is for
- why they should pick you
- what to do next
Then look for proof: real photos of your work, reviews, examples, prices or at least “from” prices. Stock photos and vague promises make people leave.
3. Is it easy to contact you?
- Is there one obvious button to call, book or request a quote, on every page?
- Does the form work? Submit it yourself and see where it goes and how long the reply takes.
- On a phone, can you tap the number to call?
Contact problems are the most expensive ones, because they lose people who already decided to buy.
Ten-minute self check
Open your site on your phone, on mobile data, and time how long the home page takes. Then ask a friend who has never seen it to tell you, after five seconds, what you do and how to contact you. Then send yourself a test enquiry. Those three checks catch most of the problems a paid audit finds.
What we send
Our free audit is written, not a sales call. You get a short document with what is working, the three changes that would make the most difference, and roughly what each one would take, whether you do it yourself or hire anyone. If you would rather review one manual process instead of your site, we do that too. Request your free audit here, or read what a small business website should cost if the audit points to a rebuild.