You do not need an agency or a subscription to find out what is wrong with your website. Most of what a professional audit covers can be checked by the owner in an hour, with free tools and a phone. The hard part is not the checking. It is knowing which of the things you find actually matter.
This is the order we would do it in. Each step has a time next to it, and together they come to sixty minutes.
Before you start
- Access to Google Search Console for your site. If you do not have it, set it up today and come back next week: Google needs a few days to fill it with data.
- Your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, because that is how most of your visitors arrive.
- A list with three columns: what is wrong, what it costs you, and how to fix it. The middle column is the one that matters at the end.
1. Check what Google has indexed (10 minutes)
In Search Console, open the Pages report. It shows how many of your pages are in Google’s index, and for the ones that are not, the reason. Compare the indexed number to how many pages you think you have. If it is far lower, that is your most important finding, because a page Google has not indexed cannot rank for anything.
While you are there, open Sitemaps and check that yours has been submitted and read recently. When we audited our own site in September, the right sitemap had never been submitted at all. Google was still working from the one for the old version of the site.
Do not judge this by typing site: and your address into Google. That search under-counts badly and will tell you pages are missing when they are not.
2. Test your speed on a phone (10 minutes)
Run your home page through PageSpeed Insights, then your most important service or product page, the one that should turn visitors into enquiries. Read the mobile result, not the desktop one, which flatters everyone.
Google’s own thresholds for a good experience: the main content appears within 2.5 seconds, the page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout barely moves while it loads. Note the top two or three suggestions for each page. We cover the usual fixes in why fast pages win local search.
3. Crawl for broken links and missing pages (10 minutes)
Download the free version of Screaming Frog and crawl your site. It is free up to 500 addresses. Then look at three things:
- Response codes: anything in the 400s is a broken link, anything in the 500s is a page that failed to load. Both belong on the list.
- Page titles: filter for missing and duplicate titles.
- H1: filter for pages with no main heading.
Then type your address followed by /robots.txt and /sitemap.xml into a browser. Both should load. If robots.txt contains Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are asking every search engine to stay away from the whole site. It is more common than you would think after a redesign.
4. Read your titles and descriptions (5 minutes)
From the same crawl, read the page titles as if they were search results, because that is what they become. Each one should say what the page offers, in the words a customer would type, with your business name at the end rather than the start. Anything over about sixty characters gets cut off. “Home” is not a title.
5. The phone test (5 minutes)
On your phone, open your site as a stranger would. Can you find the phone number or contact button without scrolling? Does every button on the home page go somewhere? Does anything cover the page that is hard to close?
Then fill in your own contact form and check that the enquiry actually arrives. This is the most skipped check on this list and, when it fails, the most expensive. A broken form looks exactly like a quiet month.
6. Security basics (5 minutes)
- Type your address with http:// at the front. It should switch to https on its own.
- Try it with and without www. Both should end up at the same address.
- Check your forms have spam protection. If the inbox is full of junk, they do not.
- If your site runs on a system with plugins, check when they were last updated. Out-of-date plugins are one of the commonest ways sites get broken into.
7. Read your copy as a stranger (5 minutes)
Give yourself five seconds on the home page and then look away. Could a stranger say what you sell, who it is for, where you work, and what to do next? If not, that is a bigger problem than anything technical on this list, because the visitors you already have are leaving.
While you are reading, look for anything out of date: last year’s offers, people who have left, a copyright date from years ago. They tell a visitor nobody is looking after the place.
8. Check AI assistants can read you (5 minutes)
More people now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of searching. Those assistants learn about businesses by reading their websites, and plenty of sites turn them away without knowing it.
Open your robots.txt again and look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot or Google-Extended followed by Disallow: /. That shuts them out. Then check your hosting or security provider’s settings. Cloudflare, for example, now blocks AI crawlers by default on new sites. It was quietly doing that on our own site until we noticed in September, and in the meantime an AI assistant was describing us from out-of-date directory listings instead.
Blocking them can be a sensible choice. Just make it on purpose.
9. Put it in order (5 minutes)
Now use the middle column. Sort everything you found into four groups and work from the top:
- Stops enquiries. A broken form, a hidden phone number, key pages that fail to load. Fix these today.
- Stops you being found. Pages not indexed, a robots.txt that blocks search engines, missing titles.
- Loses visitors. A slow mobile page, copy that does not say what you do.
- Tidying. Alt text, long titles, the odd redirect. Worth doing, never first.
Or let a tool do the first pass
Our free website audit covers most of steps 2 to 8 in about a minute: the speed test, the crawl, titles, security, a read of your copy and the AI crawler check. It ranks what it finds by what it costs you, which does step 9 for you. The free report reads your first five pages.
It cannot do two things. It cannot see your Search Console data, because that needs your login, and it cannot send your contact form for you. Do steps 1 and 5 yourself whichever way you go.
If you want to compare it with the alternatives first, we went through the free website audit tools worth using, including where ours falls short.
When the list is long
Most sites come out of this with a handful of fixes that take an afternoon. Some come out with a list where every item points back to how the site was built: slow because of the theme, hard to edit, pages Google cannot read. At that point fixing it can cost more than starting again, and it is worth knowing what a new website actually costs before you decide.