Website audit — what we actually check, what it costs and what you get out

Most audit offers describe the same thing as "comprehensive analysis". This text says what we check, in what order, what it costs and what you get at the end — so it can be compared against another offer rather than merely believed.

Start with the distinction that determines the value of everything else.

An audit is not a scan from a tool

Free tools — Lighthouse, SEO crawlers, browser extensions — do one thing well: they show symptoms. They report that the site loads slowly, that image descriptions are missing, that headings are out of order, and turn it into a PDF in thirty seconds.

What they will not do: say why. A tool states the site is slow. It does not state that it loads a three-megabyte script from a plugin nobody has used in two years, and that removing it clears half the list at once.

Hence a simple rule when choosing a supplier: if somebody offers an audit for free, they have probably dropped your address into a machine, generated a report and want to sell a retainer. We price our time, because we check what a machine cannot see — a person's work, not a script's.

The tools are not worthless. They are a starting point, not a result.

Three layers, and an order that is not a matter of taste

The order follows from dependency, not preference. Work in a higher layer cannot take effect if the layer below is broken. Rewriting the content of a site the search engine does not show is the most expensive way of not solving the problem — and the most common.

Layer 1: technical

This is the foundation and the first thing we check:

• Whether every URL responds with what it should. A page that exists answers 200, a deleted one 404, a moved one 301 or 308. A mismatch between code and content is a defect with no symptom at all.
• Speed on a phone, not on an office connection. Measured in the conditions the site is actually opened in.
• Whether a crawler can fetch the site — robots.txt, the sitemap, accidental blocks left over from a deployment.
• Certificate and redirects — whether all traffic lands on one address, over HTTPS, with no duplicate between the www and non-www versions.
• Whether the analytics works at all, and whether it counts your own traffic as customers.

The most common finding here is not spectacular: the site works, but loads scripts nobody added on purpose — leftovers from a previous supplier, analytics wired in twice, fonts from three sources. Each is harmless alone; together they add up to seconds of load time.

Layer 2: visibility

Here we answer the question visit statistics cannot pose: does the search engine show this site at all?

• How many pages are indexed and how many skipped — and with what verdict, because "not discovered" and "crawled and rejected" are different problems with different solutions.
• Which queries the site appears for, and whether they are buyers' queries or accidental.
• Whether pages compete with each other for the same phrase — because then none wins.
• Whether the redirects put in after an address change actually work. Checked from the URLs the search engine knows, not from a list of rules somebody once wrote.

It is worth knowing the four verdicts a search engine uses to describe a page, because each leads somewhere different:

Checking this takes a quarter of an hour and settles whether the work goes into content, into linking, or somewhere else entirely. Without that distinction, "we have no traffic" is a diagnosis about as useful as "it hurts".

Layer 3: content and usability

Only here does a conversation about what the site says make sense:

• Whether it answers the questions that come up in sales meetings — price, timing, who this is for, what happens after signing.
• Whether it is possible to get in touch without seven form fields, and whether the form delivers the message.
• Whether the structure reflects the customer's journey, not the firm's org chart.
• Accessibility — keyboard operation and legible contrast. For some firms, also a legal requirement.

The check we always run and which always turns something up: we walk the customer's path from arrival to sending an enquiry, on a phone, not knowing where anything is. Somebody who knows the site cannot do this — and it is the only way to see where an outsider gets lost.

A website audit and an SEO audit are not the same thing

Both names circulate interchangeably, and that is where most confusion in comparing offers comes from.

An SEO audit covers one layer: visibility. It answers why the search engine does not show the site high, and ends with recommendations on content, keywords and links.

A website audit covers all three layers, including what happens after arrival — whether the form works, whether the site works on a phone, whether the analytics measures the truth.

The distinction has a practical consequence: a firm with traffic but no enquiries does not need an SEO audit. The traffic is there — the problem is a floor above, and an SEO audit will not touch it. The reverse also holds: a firm the search engine does not show may have an excellent site and zero results.

If an offer does not say which of these you are buying, ask before signing.

A technical website audit — what exactly it covers

This name appears most often in offers and is used interchangeably with "website audit", though it means something narrower.

A technical audit is the first of the three layers above — whether the site works correctly as software and whether the search engine can read it. It does not judge the content, the offer, or whether the site persuades anyone to get in touch.

Specifically: server availability and response times, HTTP codes, redirects and redirect chains, canonical addresses, sitemap and robots file, page indexability, certificate and mixed content, mobile load speed, structured data, error handling.

It is the most measurable layer and therefore the easiest to sell — and the only one automated tools can partly perform. If an offer says "technical audit" at a full-audit price, ask outright about the other two layers. Sometimes they are simply not in scope.

Three findings a site owner will not spot alone

All three come from audits we ran — including one of our own site, where we found the most.

A URL that answers "everything is fine" and shows an error. Eleven addresses in our corpus answered 200 for sixteen months while serving an error page. The user saw the page was gone; the crawler was told everything worked, so it had no reason to report or replace it. Nobody noticed: statistics do not show addresses nobody visits, and the tools that check response codes saw nothing but 200s.

A hundred and twenty-four articles the search engine never showed once. Of 182 published texts on our blog, 124 had not a single impression over three months. Not "a poor position" — complete absence. Visit statistics showed this as "nobody reads it", which leads to the conclusion that the content is weak. The real problem was a floor below and needed entirely different work.

Analytics counting our own team as customers. One run of automated tests against production added 98 false hits before anyone noticed. At a few hundred visits a month, that is enough to draw the wrong conclusion about which pages matter. We wrote it up with three other measurement traps in four ways your numbers lie.

None of the three required a failure. All three came from default settings, or from a change after which nobody checked what happened to the URLs.

When an audit makes sense and when it is an expense

Not every site needs one, and we would rather say so before the sale.

In the first two cases on the second list we say so in conversation and do not sell an audit. The third leads straight to a conversation about a project.

What you can check yourself before ordering anything

The first layer can largely be walked on your own, and there is no reason not to. We built a self-audit checklist for exactly that — no registration, no email address.

Four checks to start with:

1. Walk the site on your own phone — the home page, one offer page, the contact form.
2. Open Search Console, range three months, and look at two numbers: impressions and clicks. Many impressions with few clicks is a titles problem. No impressions is an indexing problem.
3. Send an enquiry through your own form and check whether it arrived, to whom, and after how long.
4. Check who has access to the domain, the hosting, the system and the analytics.

If those four come out well, you probably need work on the content, not a technical audit. That is a result too, and we would rather say it than sell a service.

How the audit runs

Five working days and three things on your side. Worth knowing what you are agreeing to, because two of them can move the date.

Day 0 — access. We need read rights to Search Console and Analytics, plus the site address. Not the server, not the content management system; if either turns out to be needed for something specific, we ask separately and say what for. This is the stage that most often delays the start — not because anything is difficult, but because nobody at the firm knows who holds the access.

Days 1–2 — technical and visibility. Here the tools work and so do we. A crawler collects data on every URL; we check the mismatches: addresses answering with something other than what they should, redirects that do not work, pages competing for the same phrase.

Days 3–4 — content and the customer path. Walking the site by hand on a phone, testing the form, checking whether it answers the questions sales gets asked. This part cannot be automated, which is why it costs the most.

Day 5 — document and conversation. You get the report, then an hour for questions. The conversation is part of the audit, not an extra: half the value appears when you can ask "and what exactly does that mean for us".

What we do not do along the way: change anything on your site. An audit is read-only. If we find something needing immediate action — an unresponsive page, an expired certificate — we say so at once, not on day five.

What a free audit gives you, and what it does not

The free audit is an industry standard, and it is worth saying plainly what it is.

A free audit is a sales tool and there is nothing improper about that — provided both sides know it. Its purpose is to show that problems exist, specifically enough to build trust and generally enough that they cannot be fixed without buying the service. It is usually an export from an automated tool, wrapped in a conversation.

What you actually get from it:

• A list of machine-detected first-layer defects — real value, because some genuinely need fixing.
• The scale of the problem: whether there are five or two hundred.
• A reason for a conversation in which an offer will be made.

What you will not get from it, which matters more:

• Priority. A tool lists fifty observations and never says which three matter. That is precisely what a paid audit is for.
• A judgement of content and usability. The third layer cannot be measured by machine, so a free audit does not contain it.
• The answer "you do not need this service". An audit that is a sales tool cannot end that way.

When it is worth taking: when you want to see the scale and get to know a supplier before paying anyone. That is a sensible use, and we have two tools for it with no registration — a self-audit checklist and a website speed test.

When it is not worth stopping there: when the site has traffic and no enquiries. The answer lies in the second and third layers, which no free audit covers.

How to compare two audit offers

Five questions that settle whether you are comparing the same thing. Each follows from something above.

1. "Which of the three layers does this price cover?" A cheap offer and one at four times the price can both be honest — if the first covers SEO alone and the second the whole thing. Without this question you compare numbers, not scope.
2. "How much is done by a tool and how much by a person?" If the answer is "we have advanced software", you are buying an export from a machine you could run yourself.
3. "Do I get a list of priorities or a list of defects?" Three hundred problems with no order is useless — and easy to generate.
4. "What of the recommendations can I do myself?" An honest answer always includes some part. "Everything requires our team" says more about the sales model than about your site.
5. "Is the audit fee deducted if I commission the fixes?" With us, yes. Worth asking everywhere, because the answer changes the real cost of the decision.

What it costs

1,625 EUR net, the result in 5 working days, an hour discussing the report. There is one price and we give it before the start, not after.

If you decide on a project with us afterwards, we deduct that 1,625 EUR from the quote. The audit exists so that you know what to do — not so that you pay twice for the same diagnosis.

What the price does not include: implementing the recommendations. The audit ends with a document and a conversation; fixing is a separate decision and a separate quote, including when somebody else does it.

What you get at the end

A document, not a tool export. Inside:

• A list of findings with priorities — what to fix first and what can wait a quarter, with the reasoning behind the order.
• What can be done in-house, separated from what needs a supplier. Some recommendations usually do not need us, and that is written down explicitly.
• An effort estimate against every item, so it can be budgeted rather than merely read.
• An hour of conversation walking through the document and answering questions.

What it does not contain: a hundred pages of machine-generated charts. A report is meant to be read, not weighed.