Website audit checklist: 25 free checks to run yourself

A useful website audit checklist works through six layers in order: conversion and trust, technical health, content quality, AI visibility, links and analytics, and accessibility. Start with the checks that cost you money when they fail, and leave the long tail of crawler warnings for last.

This guide is for anyone responsible for a site, whether you own the business or run audits for clients. You get 25 checks, the free tool that runs each one, and an honest order for the fixes, so you can do the whole review yourself before deciding whether to pay anyone. Every check works on any platform, from WordPress and Shopify to a custom build.

The website audit checklist at a glance

A website audit is a structured review of how well your site performs for visitors and search engines, and increasingly for AI assistants too. The 25 checks below sit in six layers. Each layer is ordered by how directly it touches revenue, not by how easy it is to automate.

Layer	Checks	Question it answers	Free tools
1. Conversion and trust	1 to 4	Can a stranger understand, trust, and buy from you?	Your browser, your phone, a stopwatch
2. Technical health	5 to 10	Can Google find, load, and rank your pages?	Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights
3. Content and on-page	11 to 15	Does your content deserve to rank, and is it labeled correctly?	Search Console, a site crawler
4. AI visibility	16 to 17	Can AI assistants read and quote your pages?	Your robots.txt file, a browser
5. Links and analytics	18 to 21	Are links intact, backlinks clean, and conversions tracked?	Search Console, Google Analytics
6. Accessibility	22 to 25	Can people with disabilities use the site?	A contrast checker, a keyboard

Work top to bottom. Layers 1 and 2 usually surface the findings worth acting on this week, while layers 3 to 6 build gains over the following quarter. If you only have an hour today, a focused 60-minute audit covers the highest-impact subset before you commit an afternoon to the rest.

Layer 1: conversion and trust checks

These four checks catch the problems that lose buyers who already found you. No crawler flags them, which is why so many 50-page audit reports miss the defects that actually cost sales.

Check 1: the three-second test

Open your homepage and ask two questions: what does this business sell, and why should anyone care? If a stranger cannot answer within about three seconds, visitors are leaving before any technical issue gets the chance to matter. One agency founder who reports having audited more than 500 websites treats this as the first check in every review, ahead of anything a tool can measure. The fix is a headline that names who you help and what outcome you deliver, because a clever tagline usually fails this test where a plain sentence about the result passes.

Check 2: trust markers

Suspicious visitors do not buy, and the signals that trigger suspicion are usually small. Auditors report the same trust killers again and again:

• No physical address or phone number anywhere on the site
• A missing padlock icon, meaning the SSL certificate is broken or expired
• A footer copyright date from three years ago
• Stock photos presented as real team members
• No reviews or testimonials at all

Most of these take minutes to correct, and none requires a redesign. Fix the copyright date today, then source real photos and reviews this month.

Checks 3 and 4: the path to purchase

Check 3 counts clicks. Starting from your homepage, count how many it takes to reach the pages that matter: pricing, your main service, the contact form. Revenue-focused auditors treat more than three clicks to any of them as a leak, and the pattern behind the leak is consistent, with businesses burying their best material in PDFs and third-level submenus. Check 4 is submitting every form yourself, then confirming it sends and that the enquiry lands where a human actually reads it. A form that fails silently shows up in no report except your bank statement.

Layer 2: technical checks that decide whether Google ranks you

Technical SEO is where most audits begin. It sits second here because a site nobody wants to buy from gains little by ranking. Once the buying path works, these six checks decide whether search engines can find and serve your pages at all.

Checks 5 and 6: indexing

Check 5 takes one search. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google and compare the result count with the number of pages you actually have. A large gap in either direction points to indexing problems or index bloat. Check 6 is Google Search Console, which is free and worth setting up for any site you care about. Review the page indexing report for pages Google cannot or will not index. Auditors report finding entire product catalogs invisible to search because of one wrong setting, usually a leftover noindex tag or a blocked path in robots.txt. If rankings look fine but visits stay flat, work through these nine fixable reasons a website gets no traffic before assuming the worst.

Check 7: speed on the pages that earn money

Google has used page speed as a ranking input since 2010 and folded it into the broader Page Experience update that rolled out between June and August 2021. Still, audit speed where it earns money, not everywhere. Test your product pages, checkout, contact page, and ad landing pages on a phone over a 4G connection, and time how long until a visitor can act. Auditors who focus on conversions treat anything past about three seconds on those pages as lost sales. Run each money page through a free website speed test and record the numbers, so you can prove the fixes worked; the About page can wait its turn.

Checks 8, 9, and 10: mobile, security, and crawl basics

Check 8 is mobile experience. Mobile devices carry most web traffic; one agency's published checklist puts the figure at 58%. Mobile visitors also convert differently, so compare mobile and desktop conversion rates in your analytics. If mobile trails badly, look for the usual killers: forms that are painful on a phone, buttons too small to tap, pop-ups that cannot be closed, and text too small to read without a zoom. Check 9 is security. Every page should load over HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings, because browsers now tell visitors when it does not. Check 10 covers crawl basics: an up-to-date XML sitemap submitted in Search Console, and a robots.txt file that is not blocking sections you want ranked. If this layer turns up more than a handful of findings, a technical SEO audit that puts the fixes in priority order beats a spreadsheet of raw warnings.

Layer 3: content and on-page checks

Check 11: clear the content graveyard

Outdated content does more than look bad. It drags on rankings for the whole site. Auditors describe the same graveyard on most established sites: blog posts from 2019 about upcoming trends, service pages for offerings that no longer exist, team pages listing people who left years ago, and event pages for conferences held in 2020. Then sort everything by traffic and read from the bottom of the list up. A rule of thumb reported from those audits: anything drawing around 10 visits a month or fewer gets updated, merged into a stronger page, or redirected. A step-by-step AI content audit turns this from a weekend job into an afternoon one.

Checks 12, 13, and 14: on-page fundamentals

The fundamentals are quick to verify. Check 12: every page carries a unique title tag and meta description, written for the searcher rather than stuffed for the crawler. Check 13: one H1 per page, with subheadings in a logical order underneath. Check 14: no thin or duplicate pages competing for the same term. Before anything new goes live, run the draft against a 27-point on-page SEO checklist so your next audit finds less.

Check 15: content gaps

List your top three competitors and note where they rank for questions you have never answered. The point is not to copy them. Auditors frame it as one blunt question: why would someone choose them over you? If your site cannot answer that, neither can your customers, and the gaps you find become next quarter's content plan.

Layer 4: the AI visibility checks older checklists skip

A growing share of research now happens inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews, and those systems can only recommend what they can read. Check 16: confirm your robots.txt file and firewall are not blocking the crawlers AI assistants rely on, the same way you would confirm Googlebot access. Check 17: make your key pages quotable. Answer the core question in the first paragraph and keep passages self-contained, so they still make sense lifted out of context. Add a genuine FAQ section where the questions warrant one. These habits overlap almost entirely with good on-page writing, which is why using AI to improve rankings without spam starts with structure rather than volume.

Layer 5: links, backlinks, and analytics

Check 18: broken links

A few broken links annoy visitors. Too many send them away. What matters most is where they break: a 404 on your main service page is an emergency, while a dead link in an old blog post is a chore. Crawl the site or export your sitemap and check response codes, then fix money pages first.

Checks 19 and 20: backlink hygiene

Bad backlinks do their damage quietly. One agency describes a client who lost 70% of their traffic after a shady SEO firm built thousands of spam links, and reports the recovery took months. Check 19: review your backlink profile for sudden spikes of low-quality links and links from obvious spam domains. Check 20: look at anchor text distribution. A natural profile uses many phrasings, while a wall of exact-match anchors reads as manipulation. And the standing rule those auditors give: if anyone offers 500 backlinks for 50 dollars, walk away.

Check 21: analytics that answer the money question

The auditor behind the three-second test reports that about half the businesses they review are flying blind, with analytics that are broken or simply ignored. The test is one question: which traffic sources produce customers, not just visits? If you cannot answer it, check for missing conversion goals and untracked forms or calls, then for revenue data that never reaches the reports. It also helps to know how much traffic you actually need, so every later audit has a baseline to compare against.

Layer 6: accessibility checks

Accessibility belongs in every site audit because it affects real users and legal exposure as well as rankings. The US Department of Justice publishes guidance on how the ADA applies to websites, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set the standard to audit against:

• Check 22: text contrast of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text
• Check 23: descriptive alt text on every image that carries meaning
• Check 24: every interactive element usable by keyboard alone, with a visible focus state
• Check 25: captions on video and transcripts for audio

The overlap with plain usability is almost total, so these fixes tend to lift conversion alongside compliance.

Fix in this order

Running 25 checks produces a list. The value is in the sequence, so group everything you found into three windows:

When to fix	What goes in this window	Why it comes first
This week	Broken forms and conversion paths (checks 3 and 4), indexing failures (5 and 6), missing trust markers (2), broken analytics (21)	These lose revenue every day they stand, and most cost hours rather than weeks to fix
This month	Slow money pages (7), mobile usability (8), security warnings (9), broken links on key pages (18), AI crawler access (16)	Meaningful gains that need a developer's time or a proper content pass
This quarter	Content graveyard cleanup (11), content gaps (15), backlink cleanup (19 and 20), accessibility upgrades (22 to 25)	Compounding improvements that reward steady work more than urgency

Anything a tool flagged that does not map to a check above goes to the bottom of the pile, because sequence is what pays off here. Asana's website audit template page describes a software company that centralized its audit findings and fixed the SEO issues hiding in old spreadsheets; the same page reports organic traffic grew 20% within three months.

How often to run your website audit checklist

A common recommendation is a full audit at least once a year for smaller sites, and two to three times a year for larger ones. Between full runs, a short monthly pass covers the volatile checks: indexing in Search Console, form submissions, speed on your top pages. Re-audit after any redesign or migration, because those events break more than they announce.

Should you run it yourself or hire help?

Most of this checklist needs observation rather than expertise, so the honest answer is that you can run the majority of it yourself. Where that changes:

Your situation	Best route	Why
You know basic analytics and have a free afternoon	Run the full checklist yourself	The checks need attention more than tooling, and free tools cover them
Revenue is falling and you cannot say why	Bring in an auditor	Diagnosing an unknown cause is where experience pays back fastest
You spend serious money on ads	Bring in an auditor	Landing page and tracking faults waste budget daily while you learn
The findings are deeply technical, such as rendering or migrations	Identify issues yourself, hire the fixes	Spotting a problem is cheap, while implementing some fixes is not

The return question is the one experienced auditors ask: will fixing what you found generate more revenue than the help costs? For most sites with real traffic, the answer is yes.

FAQs

What is a website audit checklist?

A website audit checklist is a structured list of checks that reviews a site's conversion path, technical health, content, AI visibility, links, and accessibility. It turns a vague instruction to review the website into a repeatable process with a clear fix order.

How long does a full website audit take?

Working through all 25 checks takes most site owners an afternoon. A triage pass on the highest-impact checks takes about an hour, and a deep technical crawl of a large site runs longer, sometimes days.

Which free tools do I need for a website audit?

Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights cover indexing and speed. Your own phone covers the mobile and conversion checks, and a free contrast checker covers accessibility. Paid crawlers help on large sites but are not required to start.

How often should you audit your website?

Run the full checklist at least once a year, and again after any redesign or migration. Larger sites benefit from two or three full audits a year, with a short monthly pass on indexing and speed in between.

What is the difference between a website audit and an SEO audit?

An SEO audit covers the checks search engines care about: indexing, speed, content, and links. A website audit is broader, adding the conversion and trust checks plus accessibility, because a site can rank well and still fail to turn visitors into customers.

Run the three-second test now

Open your homepage on your phone and run check 1 before anything else on this website audit checklist. It takes three seconds and often explains more than a 50-page report would. When you want the full picture with the fixes already in priority order, review a sample SEO report and talk to the team about running one for your site.

Resources / References

1. since 2010
2. Page Experience update
3. guidance on how the ADA applies to websites
4. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

Sources

• Website Audit Checklist: Your Cheat Sheet for Accessibility
• [The 6-Part Website Audit Checklist for 2025 Epic Google ...
• Website audit checklist that actually impacts revenue
• How to run a website audit (checklist inside)
• Website Audit Template: Track Issues, Fixes, and ...

Disclaimer: This article is general information about rules and figures that applied when it was written, not personalised financial, tax or investment advice. It does not take account of your income, obligations, risk tolerance or goals, and rates and thresholds change. Verify the current position with the relevant authority, and speak to a licensed adviser or a qualified accountant before acting.