Website Audit Checklist

Most small business websites are never checked after launch. They are built, they go live, and then nobody looks at them properly again until something breaks or the enquiries dry up. A website audit is just a structured look at whether your site is still doing its job, and you do not need to be technical to run one.

This is the checklist we work through, written so you can use it yourself. Set aside an hour, open your own site on a phone and on a laptop, and work down the list. Anything you cannot answer with a confident yes is worth looking at.

Before you start: what an audit is actually for

An audit is not a hunt for perfection. It is a hunt for the small number of things that are costing you enquiries. In practice those cluster in five places: whether people can find you, whether they understand what you do, whether they can contact you easily, whether the site works on a phone, and whether anything is quietly broken.

Score each item yes, no, or not sure. The not sures matter as much as the nos, because a thing nobody has checked is usually a thing nobody is looking after.

1. Can people find you?

If your site cannot be found, nothing else on this list matters much.

2. Does the site explain what you do?

This is the check most owners skip, because they already know the answer and cannot unsee it. The test is whether a stranger knows.

• Within five seconds of landing on your homepage, is it clear what you do and who for?
• Is the place you work stated in plain words, not just implied?
• Does every service you sell have a page of its own, rather than one page listing everything?
• Are prices, ranges, or at least a starting point mentioned anywhere?
• Is there proof: real photos of real work, named testimonials, case studies?
• Are the photos your own, rather than stock images of people who do not work there?
• Is anything on the site out of date: old prices, services you dropped, a year that has passed?

If you want a fuller version of this section, we wrote it up separately in what makes a good website.

3. Can people contact you without effort?

Almost every site we audit loses enquiries somewhere in this list, and the fixes are usually small. On one store we went through this summer, the email address in the footer had been wired up as a telephone link. Clicking it tried to dial a phone number. It had been like that for months and nobody had ever mentioned it, because customers who cannot reach you do not write in to say so.

• Is your phone number visible on every page, not just the contact page?
• On a phone, does tapping the number actually dial it?
• Is there one obvious next step on every page, rather than three competing ones?
• Does your contact form actually send? Submit it yourself and wait for the email.
• Does the form arrive somewhere a person reads daily, and not a spam folder?
• Do you reply within one working day, and does the site say so?
• Is there a second contact route for people who will not fill in a form, such as WhatsApp?

Test the form from a phone on mobile data, not from the office wifi. It is the single most common broken thing we find, and nobody notices because the owner never tests it after launch.

Check the form actually fits your customers too. On the same audit we found a contact form whose country dropdown offered exactly three choices: Austria, Viet Nam and Japan. There was no United Kingdom on it. This was a Kent timber yard. Elsewhere on the site, a free delivery progress bar congratulated customers on qualifying for free delivery with an empty basket, and the free delivery threshold was displaying as £50,000 rather than £500.

4. Does it work on a phone?

Most people will meet your business on a small screen, often outdoors, often in a hurry.

• Open your site on your own phone and read a full page without pinching or zooming.
• Can you tap every button first time, without hitting the one next to it?
• Does anything run off the side of the screen, forcing you to scroll sideways?
• Do the images load quickly on mobile data with wifi turned off?
• Is the text big enough to read at arm’s length?
• Are pop-ups easy to close on a small screen?

More detail on this one in how to make a website mobile friendly.

5. How fast is it?

Speed is worth checking properly rather than guessing, because your own site always feels fast to you: your browser has it cached.

• Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and note the mobile score, not the desktop one.
• Check the largest page you have, usually a gallery or a shop category.
• Look at your image sizes. A photo straight off a phone can be several megabytes and does not need to be.
• Count the plugins or add-ons if you are on WordPress. Each one costs something.

6. Is anything quietly broken?

These are the items that cost nothing to check and occasionally save a lot.

The domain one catches people out more than anything else on this page. A lapsed domain takes the website and the email with it.

7. Who owns it?

Worth answering once, in writing, while nothing is going wrong.

• Is the domain registered in your business name, not your designer’s?
• Do you have the login for the domain registrar?
• Do you have the login for the hosting, and for the website itself?
• If your web designer disappeared tomorrow, could you still get into everything?

If any of those is a no, fix it now rather than at the point you need it. This is the least urgent item on the list right up until it is the only one that matters.

8. Accessibility and the legal basics

• Can you navigate the main menu using only the keyboard?
• Do images have alternative text describing them?
• Is there enough contrast between the text and the background to read it in sunlight?
• Do you have a privacy policy, and does it reflect what you actually collect?
• If you use non-essential cookies, do you ask before setting them?

What an audit actually turns up

Checklists can feel abstract until you see what comes out of one. Below is a real example: an online timber and furniture retailer, a working shop taking orders every day, audited by us this summer. The owner knew something was wrong because sales were soft. He did not know any of the following.

• A garden office listed at £17,500 with “was £9,950” struck through beside it. The old price was lower than the price being charged, so a price rise was being displayed as a discount. That is a trading standards problem, not a typo.
• A £9,500 made to order garden office carrying an “Only 5 left” stock warning. It is built to order. There were never five.
• A contact form whose country dropdown offered three choices: Austria, Viet Nam and Japan. No United Kingdom, on a business selling to British customers.
• A phone link with two numbers crammed into it, so it dialled neither. It had never worked.
• A free delivery progress bar telling customers they had qualified with an empty basket, and a delivery threshold displaying as £50,000 rather than £500.
• Terms and conditions naming the wrong company, citing a company number the owner had resigned from months earlier, which had a strike off proposal against it. Anyone who looked it up found a stranger’s name at an address hundreds of miles away.
• A shipping policy inviting customers to collect from a warehouse in a city the business had left. They would have turned up to nothing.
• A page selling Victorian floorboards that described scaffold boards, and four separate category pages running word for word identical copy, including a lighting page that described “handmade furniture crafted by our carpenters” while selling three metal wall lights.
• Meta descriptions of up to 446 characters against Google’s roughly 160 character display limit, so every one was cut off mid sentence in the search results.
• A blog of 12 posts that were really 3 articles rewritten with different titles, which Google reads as duplicate content and marks the whole site down for.
• Genuine happy customers, a real Trustpilot rating, and not one review, rating or testimonial anywhere on the site. Asking people to spend £9,500 purely on trust.

Two things are worth taking from that list. The first is that none of it required a rebuild. Almost every item was an afternoon’s work once somebody had actually looked. The second is that the owner had walked past all of it every day for a year. You cannot audit your own site with fresh eyes, which is the whole reason for working down a written list instead of browsing around and trusting your instinct.

What to do with the results

You will usually end up with a long list, which is why the last step matters: sort it. Put every no into one of three groups.

If the first group is empty and the second is short, your site is in decent shape and needs looking after rather than replacing. Keeping it that way is what a website maintenance plan is for.

If the first group is long, or you finished the checklist thinking the site is fighting you rather than helping, the honest answer is usually a rebuild rather than a patch. That is what we do: web design for small business, quoted as one fixed price before anything starts. Either way, you now know which it is, which is the point of auditing in the first place.

Happy to run through your list with you if it would help. Tell us about your site and we will give you a straight answer about what actually needs doing, including if the answer is not very much.