The short answer
A useful audit tells you what’s working, what’s worth a look and what’s worth fixing, in plain English, with your goals in mind. Almost every website has fixes; the order is what matters.
Most free website audits follow the same recipe. Enter your address, receive forty pages of red warnings, answer a phone call from someone who would like to fix all of them for you. You finish reading feeling worse about your website and no clearer about what to do.
A useful audit should leave you knowing three things: what’s working, what’s worth a look and what’s worth fixing, in that order, in plain English, with your goals in mind.
Good news first
Every website does some things well. A good audit says so, and it matters: you should keep what’s working while you fix the rest. Starting with the good news also makes the rest easier to act on. A to-do list is useful. A verdict isn’t.
Why a long list of warnings isn’t the point
Almost every website has problems. WebAIM scans the home pages of the top million websites every year, and in 2026 it found errors on 95.9% of them, an average of 56 each. Hard-to-read text alone showed up on 83.9%.
So “we found 200 issues” tells you nothing. What you need is which handful matter for your goal, and in what order. Some fixes pay for themselves: in a study Deloitte ran for Google, mobile sites just 0.1 seconds faster saw 8.4% more conversions in retail. Others can wait.
What the 120 checks cover
Our free Site Check runs 120 checks on your website, 10 in each of 12 areas:
- How it looks, and how easy it is to find your way around
- How it works on phones, and how well it turns visitors into customers
- Trust, speed and technical health
- Whether everyone can use it, and whether it’s secure
- Google basics, showing up in search, and your local presence and reviews
- Your content and AI search, plus tracking and tools
Each area gets a score out of 10. Speed is measured the way Google measures it, against Google’s own marks, like 2.5 seconds for the main content to show. We ask what you want your website to do before we start, because “more calls” and “look more professional” lead to different advice.
Want a second opinion on yours? Our free Site Check looks at your website and your Google listing. Good news first.
Get my free Site CheckWhat you get
You tell us your website and your goal. We run the checks and email you the report, usually in about 5 minutes. It shows:
- A score out of 10 for each area, and what’s already working
- The fixes that matter most, in order, with what each one does for you
- Where you show up on Google Maps, for the searches that bring customers
- Your options: fix it yourself for $0, or one fixed price for us to do it
The whole report comes as a PDF too. It’s written for the owner, not for a developer. If a finding needs a technical term, we explain it.
What to do with it
Some fixes you can do yourself in an afternoon: updating your hours, adding a missing page, compressing a huge photo. Do those first. For the rest, pick the one thing that matters most for your goal and start there. You don’t need to fix everything at once, and you definitely don’t need to fix it all with us.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a sales call in disguise. If you’d like us to do the fixes, the report shows one fixed price. Want someone watching it after? Care starts at $39 a month. If you’d rather take the list and run, that’s fine too.
What I’d do first
- Today: get a check, and read the good news before the fixes.
- This week: do the quick fixes yourself: hours, photos, a missing page.
- This month: tackle the one fix that matters most for your goal.
Ready to see yours? Get a free website check. It takes under a minute to ask for.
Key takeaways
- A useful audit starts with what’s working.
- Nearly every website has problems: 95.9% of the top million home pages had accessibility errors.
- It explains each fix in plain English, in order, with your goals in mind.
- Ours runs 120 checks in 12 areas, each scored out of 10.
- Do the quick fixes yourself first, then the one that matters most.