How to Do a Website Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide

A website audit is a systematic review of your site's health across every dimension that matters: SEO, performance, security, accessibility, and content quality. Done properly, it identifies the specific issues holding your site back and gives you a prioritised list of actions. Here's how to do one.

What is a website audit?

A website audit is a comprehensive analysis of your website's quality, performance, and technical health. Unlike a simple SEO check, a full audit examines everything from how fast your pages load to whether your forms are accessible to users with disabilities.

The goal is to identify all the issues affecting your site — ranked by severity and impact — so you can fix the most important problems first and build a healthier site over time.

Before you start

Before diving in, set up your measurement baseline:

• Install Google Analytics (or a privacy-first alternative like Plausible) if you haven't already. You need traffic data to understand which pages matter most.
• Connect Google Search Console — it shows you which queries bring traffic, which pages are indexed, and any crawl errors.
• Document your current state — take screenshots or record your current rankings, traffic, and conversion rates. You need a baseline to measure improvement against.
• Prioritise by traffic — focus your audit on the pages that actually get visitors. Start with your homepage, top landing pages, and any pages you're actively trying to rank.

SEO audit

The SEO portion of your audit covers on-page elements, technical SEO, and indexation. Key areas to check:

On-page SEO

• Does every page have a unique, optimised title tag (50–60 characters)?
• Does every page have a unique, compelling meta description (150–160 characters)?
• Is there exactly one H1 per page, containing the primary keyword?
• Are headings hierarchical (H1 → H2 → H3)?
• Do all images have descriptive alt text?
• Are Open Graph and Twitter Card tags set for all pages?

Technical SEO

• Is your site fully accessible over HTTPS?
• Is your sitemap.xml submitted to Google Search Console?
• Are there any crawl errors in Search Console?
• Are canonical tags set correctly to prevent duplicate content?
• Are robots.txt rules correct — not blocking important pages?
• Are there any broken internal links (404s)?

Performance audit

Run your key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and note the Core Web Vitals scores:

• LCP — should be under 2.5 seconds
• INP — should be under 200ms
• CLS — should be under 0.1

Look at the "Opportunities" section in PageSpeed Insights for specific recommendations. Common fixes include optimising images, removing render-blocking resources, and enabling caching. See our website speed guide for detailed steps.

Security audit

Security issues can affect your rankings (Google may flag hacked sites) and expose your users to risk:

• Is your SSL certificate valid and not expiring soon?
• Are HTTP security headers set (CSP, X-Frame-Options, etc.)?
• Are your CMS and plugins up to date?
• Are sensitive files (.git, .env) publicly accessible?
• Does your site score well on securityheaders.com?

Our website security checklist covers all 20 key security checks in detail.

Accessibility audit

Run an automated accessibility check with axe DevTools or WAVE. Common issues:

• Insufficient colour contrast
• Missing form labels
• Images without alt text
• Non-accessible interactive elements (buttons, modals)
• Pages without proper heading structure

Follow automated checks with manual keyboard-only navigation testing. Also see our WCAG accessibility guide.

Content audit

Review your content's quality and effectiveness:

• Thin content — pages with fewer than 300 words that don't serve a clear purpose. Either enrich them or consolidate them.
• Duplicate content — similar content across multiple pages can dilute your rankings. Use canonical tags or consolidate.
• Outdated information — statistics, prices, product details, and legal information become outdated. Schedule regular content reviews.
• Underperforming pages — pages that rank on pages 2–4 in Google are prime candidates for updates to push them to page 1.

How to prioritise your findings

After completing all sections, you'll likely have a long list of issues. Prioritise by the intersection of two factors:

• Impact — how significantly will fixing this issue improve the site? Critical errors (SSL failures, major crawl blocks) should be fixed immediately.
• Effort — how long will it take? Low-effort, high-impact fixes (adding missing alt text, updating meta descriptions) should be done first.

Create a simple spreadsheet with columns for Issue, Impact (High/Med/Low), Effort (High/Med/Low), and Status. Work through it systematically.

How often should you audit?

A comprehensive audit should be done at minimum annually, and ideally every quarter for larger sites. Trigger an audit any time you:

• Make significant structural changes to your site
• Migrate to a new CMS or hosting provider
• Notice an unexplained drop in traffic or rankings
• Redesign your website
• Add significant new content or functionality

The fastest way to start: run your site through our free website audit tool for an instant grade across all key dimensions.