A website audit examines the four things that determine whether a site produces work: whether it is found, whether it loads, whether it convinces, and whether it is safe to leave running. Most sites have problems in at least two, and the majority of those problems have gone unnoticed because nothing about them announces itself.
Why sites drift without anyone noticing
Websites do not fail loudly. A form stops delivering and nobody reports the enquiry they believe they sent. A page slips out of the index and traffic declines gradually enough to look like seasonality. An expired plugin introduces a vulnerability that sits there for months.
None of these produce an alert. They produce a business that is slowly getting fewer enquiries and has no idea why, which is the single most common situation we are called into.
What an audit covers
Visibility
Whether the site is being crawled and indexed properly, whether the robots file and meta directives are doing what was intended, whether the sitemap reflects reality, and whether pages are competing with each other for the same queries.
This is where the most damaging problems hide, because a site excluded from search looks entirely normal to its owner.
Performance
Real-visitor field data rather than a desktop test score: how quickly the main content appears, how responsive the page is when tapped, and whether the layout shifts under the reader. Image weight, script load, and server response time all feed into this.
Conversion
Whether the phone number is tappable and visible on every page, whether forms actually deliver, whether the site answers the questions a customer asks before making contact, and whether the path from arrival to enquiry has any friction in it.
The cheapest wins usually live here, because a site that is already getting traffic and not converting is leaving work on the table every day.
Security and continuity
Platform and extension currency, certificate validity and renewal, where backups are held and whether a restore has been tested, and whether domain and hosting are registered in your name with access you control.
What comes out of it
A prioritised list rather than a scan report. The distinction matters, because an automated scan produces dozens of flagged items of wildly different importance and no indication of which ones cost you money.
What is useful is an ordered set of findings: what is actively costing enquiries now, what is a risk that has not materialised yet, and what is a refinement worth doing when there is time. Each with an estimate of effort, so the decision about what to fix is yours to make with real information.
When it is worth doing
- Enquiries have declined and nobody knows why. The most common trigger, and usually resolvable.
- Before commissioning a rebuild. Frequently the audit finds that targeted fixes achieve most of the goal, which changes the size of the project.
- After inheriting a site from a previous developer or agency, where nobody knows what was configured or why.
- Before a marketing programme. Driving traffic to a site with conversion problems multiplies the problem rather than the results.
- Periodically, because sites drift, platforms change, and the things that break tend to break quietly.
The part that matters most
An audit is only as useful as what happens afterwards. A document listing forty issues that nobody acts on has produced nothing.
Which is why the output should be ordered by impact and paired with a realistic view of what each fix involves. The intent is a short list of things worth doing next, not a comprehensive inventory of everything that could theoretically be improved.
Frequently asked questions
What does a website audit include?
Four areas: visibility covering indexing and crawlability, performance measured on real visitor data, conversion covering whether the site actually generates enquiries, and security and continuity including backups, certificates, and whether domain and hosting are in your name.
How do I know if my website has problems?
Frequently you do not, because websites fail quietly. Forms stop delivering without anyone reporting it, pages slip out of the index gradually, and vulnerabilities sit unnoticed. Declining enquiries with no obvious cause is the most common signal.
Is an automated scan the same as an audit?
No. A scan produces a list of flagged items of wildly varying importance with no indication of which cost you money. An audit prioritises findings by impact and pairs each with the effort involved, so the decisions about what to fix can actually be made.
Should I audit before or after a redesign?
Before. An audit frequently establishes that targeted fixes achieve most of the goal, which changes the size and cost of the project considerably. It also identifies what must be preserved during any rebuild.
How often should a website be audited?
Periodically rather than on a fixed schedule, and particularly after inheriting a site, before commissioning a rebuild, before starting a marketing programme, or when enquiries decline without an obvious explanation.
What is the most common problem found in an audit?
Conversion issues, typically a phone number that is not tappable or not visible on every page, or a form that has stopped delivering. These are inexpensive to fix and cost enquiries every day they persist.
West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.
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