Your website is the first impression of your business. If it underperforms, you lose visitors and fast.
Regular audits keep your secure, good speed for a user and visible in search in search engines.
In this post, i will show you exactly what I check and the tools that I use.
Why does a website audit matter
Websites degrade over time. Links break, content becomes out-dated, plugins become out-dated and performance drops as changes are made.
Without regular audits, this can impact:
- Your search rankings
- User experience
- Conversions
When I audit a site, the focus is on:
- Identifying technical issues early
- Improving your search visibility
- Strengthening the user experience
- Keeping your content accurate
- Maintaining performance
- Ensure your websites code is optimised for key phrases
The tools I use
I combine specialist software checks with manual checks to get a complete overview.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog scans your website in a similar way to a search engine and easily detects technical issues.
It helps identify:
- Broken links (404 errors)
- Content duplication
- Page titles and meta descriptions (if any are under or over the character limit)
- Redirect issues
- Problems with site structure
- Missing or incorrect heading tags
The data provides you with a clear picture of how your site is crawled and indexed.
Copyscape
https://www.copyscape.com checks whether your content exists elsewhere online and avoids plagiarism.
I use it to:
- Confirm the originality of your content
- Avoid search penalties
- Protect your credibility
Originality.ai
I use https://originality.ai to assess content quality.
This includes:
- Detecting over-reliance on AI-generated content
- Making sure your grammar and spelling is correct
- Assessing the readability of your content
- Verifying accuracy of claims
Google Pagespeed Insights
Page speed directly impacts rankings and user behaviour. Google provides a free tool https://pagespeed.web.dev for website owners to spot areas to improve.
I use it to:
- Measure performance on mobile and desktop
- Identify large assets and inefficient code
- Highlight speed improvement opportunities
- Review user experience signals
Google Search Console
Google Search Console shows how your site performs in search.
I use it to:
- Monitor indexing
- Identify crawl errors
- Analyse search queries
- Detect mobile usability issues
- Review sitemap coverage
Manual checks: What tools miss
Tools don’t detect everything. I manually review your site to ensure it works as expected.
My manual check includes:
- Content clarity and accuracy
- Internal linking and navigation
- Forms and interactive elements
- Consistency in branding and messaging
- Whether key pages meet user intent
- Over optimising for targeted key phrases
What you get from an audit
After the audit, you get clear, actionable improvements:
- Fixes for technical issues
- Faster load times
- Improved content quality
- Stronger SEO performance
- Better usability
- Green light from Google checker tools
Final thoughts
Website audits are not optional if you care about performance. If your website has not been reviewed recently, it’s likely underperforming. Fix that early, and stay ahead of the competition.