What Is a Website Audit, and What Does It Actually Check?

A website audit is a systematic scan of your site, not an opinion about your homepage. It runs a defined set of checks against every page - performance, layout, SEO, security, accessibility - and returns a list of what's actually broken, not a subjective take on whether the hero section feels right.

That distinction matters because most teams already have an opinion about their website. Someone thinks the copy is stale, someone else wants a redesign, someone's convinced the site is too slow with no data behind it. An audit replaces those opinions with a checklist: here's what's actually failing, here's why it matters, here's what to fix first.

A proper audit works through the site category by category.

Performance - load time, First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Time to First Byte. These aren't vanity metrics; Core Web Vitals directly affect both conversion and search ranking.

Layout & responsiveness - does every page hold up across desktop, tablet, and mobile, or does something break at 768px that nobody's checked since launch?

Images - broken image links, missing alt text, images that should be lazy-loaded but aren't.

Links - broken internal links, broken external links, dead anchor links - the small stuff that quietly erodes trust and SEO.

Content - thin pages, leftover placeholder text (Lorem ipsum that shipped by accident), word counts too low to rank for anything.

SEO & metadata - missing or duplicate titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, a heading hierarchy that skips from H1 to H4, missing structured data.

Security & integrity - HTTPS redirects actually working, a valid sitemap.xml, a robots.txt that isn't accidentally blocking the pages you want indexed.

Accessibility - WCAG issues an automated scan can catch: contrast ratios, touch target sizes, missing labels - the baseline before a full manual review.

Forms & auth - does your contact form actually submit? Does your signup flow break silently on one browser?

You need a website audit at a few predictable moments: right after launch, when nobody's had a chance to click every link and test every form under real conditions; on a cadence (quarterly is reasonable) once the site's been live for a while and pages have quietly drifted out of date; and any time organic traffic or conversion drops without an obvious cause, since a broken form or a tanking Core Web Vitals score can look identical to a demand problem from the outside.

If you've never actually confirmed - not assumed, confirmed - that every page on your site loads fast, resolves every link, and passes a baseline accessibility check, our free automated website audit does exactly that: it crawls your whole site, runs 85+ checks across desktop, tablet, and mobile, and delivers the results as a PDF report within 24 hours.