Free website audit: what to check, and what a good one gives you

What a website audit is for

An audit answers one question: can a customer who finds you do what they came to do? Read the page on a phone, find your number, trust what they see, and get in touch. A second question sits behind it, which is whether search engines and AI assistants can read the page well enough to send that customer to you in the first place.

Most sites fail somewhere small. In our study 72% showed at least one sign of dated technology, and among trades and home services it was 81%. Very few were broken outright: 99% were served over HTTPS, and 5% did not adapt to a phone at all. The trouble sits in the details an owner stops noticing, because you see your own site every day and already know where everything is. The full results are in what we found in 467 business websites.

A website audit checklist you can run on your phone

Open your homepage on your phone the way a customer would, from a search or a link, and work down these five questions.

Does it fit your phone?

If you have to pinch to read the text, or drag the page sideways to reach your phone number, part of it was built for a desktop. 18% of the sites we checked (82 sites) had a layout fixed to a desktop width. A customer who cannot read the page goes back to the results and taps the next name. Fix this one first.

Does the link show a preview?

Text your web address to yourself. A healthy link arrives with a title and a picture underneath it. 16% of sites (77) sent a bare address instead. Customers recommend a business by forwarding its link, and in a busy group chat a plain address is easy to miss.

Is your phone number tappable?

Tap the number on the page. Your phone should offer to ring it. If nothing happens, the number is plain text or part of a picture, and the customer has to copy it out or remember it. We did not count this one in the study, so there is no figure here, but it takes five seconds to check.

Does the page load fast?

Turn off Wi-Fi and open the homepage on mobile data. If you sit looking at a blank screen, so does every customer who finds you on their phone. Page weight is one cause of a slow page: the median homepage we measured was 179 KB, and the heaviest tenth started at 667 KB. Oversized photos are a common way a page gets heavy, and they are one of the cheaper things to fix.

Do your photos have descriptions?

This is the one check you cannot do by looking. Each picture should carry a short line of hidden text, called alt text, saying what it shows. Missing alt text was the most common problem in the whole study, on 22% of sites (105). A blind customer using a screen reader hears nothing where your photo should be, and search engines get no words to go with it. Ask your web person, or read how to write alt text for a business website.

Website audit SEO: the checks hidden in the code

A few common problems affect search without ever showing on screen. You do not need to read code to ask about them.

16% of homepages (75 sites) had no main heading marked in the code. Your name may be on screen in big letters, but nothing tells search engines and AI assistants which line says what the page is about, so they have to guess.

Another 16% (73 sites) still carried a meta keywords tag, a hidden list of search terms Google stopped reading years ago. It does nothing for your ranking and shows anyone who looks which searches you are after.

And 7% (35 sites) had the retired Universal Analytics tag, Google’s old visitor counter, which Google has switched off. If it is the only counter on your site, your visits have gone uncounted for some time.

The longer list, including old toolkits and code written for browsers nobody uses, is in when to redesign a website, with questions you can copy straight into an email to your web person.

Website audit services: what a good one gives you

Whoever does it, a useful audit tells you in plain words what fails, shows you each failure so you are not taking a score on trust, and puts a price on fixing it, so you can decide without a second meeting. If an audit leaves you with a number out of 100 and no idea what to do next, ask for the list and the price before you pay for anything.

Droom’s free website audit is the Field Test, and it works the same way. You enter your website and an email address on the Field Test page. The results appear on screen in seconds. The full report follows by email: your site tested the way a customer uses it, what fails on video, and a fixed price to fix it. If your site passes, the report says so. It costs nothing, there is no sales call, and nobody rings you unless you ask.

After the audit: repair or rebuild

Most of what an audit turns up is a small job on the site you already have. A share preview, alt text, a main heading and a stray keywords tag can all be put right without starting again.

It changes when the page does not fit a phone and sits on old toolkits as well, because fixing one tends to disturb the other. Then it is worth comparing the repair quote with a rebuild. A Droom website is $999 one time for up to five pages, or $1,999 for up to fifteen. Every build sets up and verifies your Google Business Profile, and carries structured data and an llms.txt file, which tell search engines and AI assistants who you are in a form they can read.