What a Website Audit Actually Checks (And What the Free Ones Usually Don't)

Run your website through any free online audit tool and you'll get a number out of 100 and a list of eighty problems. It's an alarming document, and almost entirely useless — because it has no way of knowing which three of those eighty things are actually costing you work.

The checks that matter

• Speed and Core Web Vitals on a mid-range phone over mobile data — not on a fast desktop connection, which is how most tools measure and how almost none of your customers browse
• Whether Google has actually indexed your pages, or found them and declined. This is far more common than owners realise and invisible without checking
• Whether pages are competing with each other for the same search term, which quietly suppresses both
• Local signals: schema, consistent contact details, and whether the site names the towns you actually cover
• AEO readiness — whether your content is structured for AI assistants to cite
• The conversion path: how many taps from landing to enquiry, and where people give up

The ranking is the whole value

Any tool can produce the list. The work is deciding what to do first. A missing alt tag and an unindexed services page are both 'issues'; only one of them is losing you money this month.

That judgement can't be automated, which is why our audits are read by a person before they reach you, and why the findings come back ordered by impact rather than by severity score.

What we won't do

We won't use the audit as a pretext for selling you a rebuild. Plenty of the sites we look at need a handful of fixes, and we say so — including when those fixes are things you can do yourself in an afternoon.

The audit is free and carries zero obligation. If your site is sound and your problem is elsewhere, that's a useful thing to find out, and it's what we'll tell you.