Free Website Audit Checklist:
SEO, CRO, Website & Design
Find what is broken, fix what is leaking, and turn your website into a growth engine.
99Audit Points
4Core Sections
100%Free to Use
1Site, Transformed
Most websites are quietly costing their owners money. Slow load times are driving visitors away before the page fully loads. Poor navigation is leaving potential customers confused. Weak copy is failing to convert the traffic that does arrive. And technical errors are preventing search engines from finding the pages that deserve to rank.
This free website audit checklist covers every critical area of your site across four powerful sections: SEO, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Website Health, and Design. Work through each section systematically and you will come out the other side with a clear picture of what is working, what is broken, and exactly what to fix first.
Section 1|
SEO Audit Checklist
(Points 1–28)
SEO issues are silent killers. They do not announce themselves with error messages. They quietly prevent your pages from ranking, getting crawled, or appearing in search results at all. These 28 points expose every SEO crack in your site.
01Google Search Console: Log into Google Search Console and run a full coverage report. Note every error, warning, and excluded page. This is ground zero for your SEO audit and should be the first thing you check.
02Index Status: Search site:yourdomain.com in Google and count the indexed pages. Compare this to the actual number of pages on your site. A large discrepancy means important pages are not being crawled or indexed.
03Robots.txt Review: Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and confirm you are not accidentally blocking important pages, directories, or your entire site from search engine bots. Even a single misplaced line can wipe out your rankings.
04XML Sitemap: Confirm your sitemap exists, is correctly formatted, and is submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. It should include only canonical, indexable pages with no broken URLs.
05HTTPS Status: Check every page loads securely over HTTPS with no mixed content warnings. Use SSL Labs to test your certificate configuration. HTTP is a trust and ranking issue you cannot afford to ignore.
06Crawl Errors: Run a full site crawl using Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Export and review every 4xx error, 5xx error, redirect chain, and broken link. These are the most common technical SEO issues on live websites.
07Duplicate Title Tags: Audit every page for duplicate or missing title tags. Every page needs a unique, keyword-rich title under 60 characters. Duplicate titles confuse search engines about which page deserves to rank.
08Duplicate Meta Desc: Check for missing or duplicated meta descriptions across your site. While not a direct ranking factor, a well-written meta description is the single biggest lever for improving your organic click-through rate.
09H1 Tag Audit: Confirm every page has exactly one H1 tag that includes the primary keyword. Multiple H1s or missing H1s are common on CMS-built sites and directly weaken on-page keyword signals.
10Thin Content Pages: Identify all pages with fewer than 300 words of actual body content. Pages that do not fully serve the searcher’s intent dilute your overall site quality score in Google’s quality evaluator guidelines.
Pro TipPages that have been live for over six months and still receive zero organic traffic should be reviewed immediately. Either improve them substantially, merge them with stronger pages, or remove them altogether.
11Duplicate Content: Use Screaming Frog or Siteliner to find internally duplicated content. Pages sharing significant body text confuse search engines and split the ranking signals that should be consolidated on one strong page.
12Canonical Tags: Audit your canonical tags across the entire site. Every important page should have a self-referencing canonical. Pages with incorrect canonicals may be passing their authority to the wrong URL silently.
13Redirect Chains: Identify and fix redirect chains where URL A points to URL B which points to URL C. Each hop loses a small percentage of link equity and adds unnecessary load time. Point all redirects directly to the final destination.
14URL Structure: Review your URL architecture. URLs should be lowercase, hyphen-separated, keyword-rich, and free of unnecessary parameters, dates, or category prefixes that add length without adding relevance.
15Internal Link Depth: Check how many clicks it takes to reach your most important pages from the homepage. Any priority page buried more than three clicks deep is being starved of crawl budget and internal link equity.
16Orphaned Pages: Identify pages with zero internal links pointing to them. These orphaned pages are difficult for search engines to discover and impossible for users to navigate to organically from within your site.
17Broken Internal Links: Fix every broken internal link on your site. A 404 on an internal link wastes crawl budget, destroys user trust, and means any link equity that page had accumulated disappears into a dead end.
18Broken External Links: Check for outbound links pointing to pages that no longer exist. Linking to dead pages reduces your content credibility and provides a poor experience for readers who click expecting a live resource.
19Image Alt Text: Audit every image across the site for missing alt text. Alt text is a direct on-page SEO signal, an accessibility requirement, and the primary way search engines understand and index your visual content.
20Structured Data: Test your structured data using Google’s Rich Results Test. Missing or broken schema means you are leaving rich result features including star ratings, FAQ accordions, and product prices on the table.
Pro TipStructured data is one of the most underleveraged SEO tools available. Adding FAQ schema alone can double the visual footprint of your search result, dramatically improving click-through rate with no change to rankings.
21Core Web Vitals: Check your Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console for every page group. Failing LCP, CLS, or INP thresholds across key page types is a confirmed negative ranking signal affecting those specific pages.
22Mobile Usability: Run a mobile usability check in Google Search Console and resolve every flagged issue. With over 60 percent of searches happening on mobile, a broken mobile experience is a broken website.
23Page Speed (Mobile): Test your five most important pages in Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile. A score below 50 on mobile represents a serious user experience and ranking problem that needs to be treated as urgent.
24Hreflang Tags: If your site serves multiple languages or regions, audit your hreflang implementation. Incorrect hreflang is one of the most common causes of international sites cannibalising their own rankings across regions.
25Soft 404 Pages: Identify soft 404s, pages that return a 200 status code but contain no useful content. These pages waste crawl budget and create index bloat that pulls down your site’s average quality score.
26Pagination: Audit how your paginated content is handled. Incorrect pagination implementation causes duplicate content issues, splits link equity across category pages, and makes it harder for search engines to discover all your content.
27Log File Analysis: If you have server access, analyse your server log files to understand which pages Googlebot is actually crawling, how often, and which pages are being ignored entirely despite being included in your sitemap.
28Keyword Cannibalization: Run a keyword cannibalization audit by mapping all your key pages to their target keywords and identifying any cases where multiple pages compete for the same term, splitting your ranking potential across both.
Section 2|
CRO Audit Checklist
(Points 29–55)
Getting traffic is only half the battle. If your website is not converting that traffic into leads, sales, and subscribers, you have a conversion problem. These 27 points systematically uncover every place your site is leaking potential revenue.
29Value Proposition: Ask five people who have never seen your site to look at your homepage for five seconds, then describe what you do. If they cannot, your value proposition is failing. Every visitor should understand your offer within three seconds of landing.
30Above-the-Fold CTA: Check whether your most important call to action is visible without scrolling on both desktop and mobile. If your CTA is buried below the fold, a significant percentage of visitors never even see what you want them to do.
31CTA Clarity: Review every call-to-action button on your site. Generic text like ‘Submit’ or ‘Click Here’ dramatically underperforms specific, benefit-driven text like ‘Get My Free Audit’ or ‘Start Growing Today’. Change every generic CTA.
32CTA Visual Hierarchy: Ensure your primary CTA button visually stands out from everything else on the page through colour contrast, size, and white space. If your CTA blends into the page design, visitors will miss it even when they want to act.
33Form Length: Count the fields in every form on your site. Every unnecessary field you remove increases form completion rates. As a rule of thumb, only ask for what you absolutely need at that specific stage of the customer journey.
34Form Friction: Test every form on your site on a real mobile device. Ensure autofill works, field labels are visible while typing, error messages are helpful and specific, and the success state is clear and reassuring after submission.
35Social Proof Placement: Check that testimonials, reviews, case studies, and trust badges appear near your primary conversion points, not buried on a separate testimonials page. Social proof is most powerful when placed immediately before the ask.
36Review Quality: Audit your testimonials and reviews for specificity. A review that says ‘Great service’ is almost worthless for conversion. A review that names a specific problem solved, a specific result achieved, and a real person’s identity is enormously powerful.
37Trust Signals: Check every page for foundational trust signals including HTTPS padlock visibility, privacy policy link, terms of service, physical address, phone number, and any relevant accreditations, certifications, or awards.
38Live Chat or Chatbot: Consider whether a live chat or chatbot would reduce friction for visitors who have questions before converting. Visitors who get answers to their pre-purchase questions convert at dramatically higher rates than those who cannot find answers.
Pro TipHeatmaps are the single fastest way to find conversion problems. A thirty-minute session recording review in Hotjar often reveals more actionable insights than weeks of analytics analysis.
39Heatmap Analysis: Install Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, or a similar heatmap tool and record at least 100 user sessions on your most important pages. Watch where users click, where they hesitate, and exactly where they leave. Real user behaviour reveals what data alone cannot.
40Scroll Depth: Check how far down the page your visitors actually scroll. If your primary CTA or key offer is positioned below where 70 percent of users stop scrolling, move it up. Positioning your offer where people actually are is an instant conversion win.
41Exit Intent: Set up exit-intent overlays on your highest-traffic pages to capture visitors before they leave. A well-designed exit popup offering a lead magnet, discount, or helpful resource can recover a meaningful percentage of otherwise lost visitors.
42Landing Page Relevance: For every paid or organic traffic source landing on your site, check that the page content matches the promise made in the ad, search result, or link that brought them there. Message match is one of the most powerful and most ignored conversion levers.
43Pricing Clarity: If you sell products or services, review whether your pricing is clear, justified, and presented in a way that frames value before revealing cost. Hidden pricing creates anxiety. Transparent, well-framed pricing creates confidence.
44Urgency and Scarcity: Audit whether your pages use legitimate urgency signals like limited availability, expiring offers, or time-sensitive bonuses where appropriate. Genuine scarcity dramatically increases conversion rates when used ethically and honestly.
45Mobile Conversion Flow: Complete the entire conversion flow on your phone as if you were a new visitor. Add a product to cart, fill out a contact form, or sign up for a newsletter. Note every piece of friction you encounter and eliminate it.
46Page Speed vs Conversion: Check your bounce rate segmented by page load speed in Google Analytics. Research consistently shows that a one-second delay in page load time reduces conversions by up to seven percent. Speed is a conversion issue, not just an SEO issue.
47Abandoned Cart / Form: If you run an e-commerce site or use lead generation forms, check whether you have an abandonment recovery sequence in place. Recovering even five percent of abandoned journeys through email follow-up can significantly impact total revenue.
48FAQ Placement: Review whether your most frequently asked questions are visible on the pages where buying decisions are made. Answering objections proactively on the page itself removes the friction of users needing to search for answers elsewhere.
49Comparison Pages: Audit whether you have pages that help decision-stage visitors compare your offer to alternatives. Visitors who find your comparison content on your site are far less likely to leave to find the same comparison on a competitor’s site.
50Micro-Conversions: Check whether you are tracking and optimising micro-conversions such as newsletter signups, free trial activations, resource downloads, and demo requests in addition to your primary macro conversions.
51A/B Testing Plan: Identify the three highest-traffic, highest-value pages on your site and create a structured A/B testing plan for each one. Testing headlines, CTA text, and page layouts on these pages will deliver the fastest measurable conversion improvements.
52404 Page Conversion: Review your custom 404 page. It should not be a dead end. It should include your navigation, a search bar, and links to your most popular or relevant pages. A well-designed 404 page recovers visitors who would otherwise simply leave.
53Checkout Friction: If you run e-commerce, audit your checkout flow step by step. Every additional step, required account creation, or unexpected cost at checkout is a dropout point. Streamline your checkout to the absolute minimum number of required actions.
54Thank You Page: Review what happens after a visitor converts. Your thank you page should confirm the action, set expectations for next steps, and introduce a secondary offer or action that deepens the relationship rather than ending the conversation.
55Conversion Analytics: Confirm that every conversion event on your site is being tracked in Google Analytics 4 with accurate attribution. Making CRO decisions without reliable conversion data is the same as navigating without a map.
Section 3|
Website Health Audit Checklist
(Points 56–77)
A healthy website is the foundation everything else is built on. These 22 points audit the structural and operational health of your site, from hosting and security through to navigation, accessibility, and analytics setup.
56Uptime Monitoring: Set up automated uptime monitoring using a tool like Uptime Robot or Better Uptime so you are immediately alerted if your site goes offline. Every minute of undetected downtime costs you traffic, leads, and revenue.
57Hosting Quality: Test your server response time using GTmetrix or Pingdom. If your Time to First Byte consistently exceeds 600 milliseconds, your hosting is the bottleneck. No amount of front-end optimisation will compensate for a slow server.
58SSL Certificate: Verify your SSL certificate is valid, not expired, and covers all subdomains you use. SSL Labs provides a free, comprehensive SSL configuration test that will highlight any security weaknesses in your HTTPS setup.
59Security Headers: Check that your site sends proper security headers including Content Security Policy, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, and HSTS. These headers protect your visitors and are increasingly factored into site quality assessments.
60Malware Scan: Run a malware and vulnerability scan using a tool like Sucuri SiteCheck or Wordfence. A compromised website not only puts your visitors at risk but can result in Google flagging your site with security warnings that destroy organic traffic.
61CMS Updates: Confirm your CMS, all plugins, and all themes are updated to their latest versions. Outdated software is the leading cause of website security breaches, and unpatched vulnerabilities are actively exploited by automated bots every day.
62Backup System: Verify that automated backups are running daily and that you have tested the restore process at least once. Having a backup you have never tested is not the same as having a backup. Know exactly how to restore your site from scratch.
63404 Error Handling: Confirm you have a custom 404 page that maintains your site’s navigation, branding, and provides helpful links back to your main content. Check Google Search Console for any 404s that have accumulated inbound links and redirect them.
64Navigation Structure: Review your main navigation with a fresh pair of eyes or test it with someone unfamiliar with your site. Every primary destination should be reachable within one click from the menu. Confusing navigation silently kills engagement and conversions.
65Site Search: If your site has an internal search function, test it thoroughly with common queries your visitors make. Poor search results are a critical failure point for larger sites where visitors rely on search to navigate to specific content or products.
Pro TipGoogle Analytics 4 and Google Search Console together give you everything you need to understand your site’s health and performance for free. If either is not installed correctly, you are making every business decision blind.
66GA4 Installation: Verify Google Analytics 4 is installed correctly on every page of your site, including thank you pages, error pages, and any subdomains. Confirm it is tracking sessions, events, and user engagement data without sampling or configuration errors.
67Goal Tracking: Confirm that every important conversion action on your site is tracked as a goal event in GA4. Without accurate conversion tracking, you cannot measure ROI, identify your best traffic sources, or make informed decisions about where to invest.
68Search Console Verify: Confirm your Google Search Console property is correctly verified, your XML sitemap is submitted, and you are actively receiving performance data. This dashboard is your most direct line of communication with Google about your site’s health.
69Cross-Browser Testing: Test your full site on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge on both desktop and mobile. Browser inconsistencies are common on custom-built or heavily themed websites and create a fragmented experience for a significant portion of your audience.
70Broken Link Check: Run a monthly broken link check using a tool like Screaming Frog or Broken Link Checker. Broken links degrade user trust, waste crawl budget, and signal to search engines that your site is not actively maintained.
71Mobile Responsiveness: Browse your entire site on an actual mobile device, not just a desktop simulator. Test every page type including your homepage, product pages, blog posts, and contact page for layout breaks, unclickable elements, and text readability.
72Accessibility Basics: Run your site through an accessibility checker like WAVE or Axe. Beyond being the right thing to do, accessibility improvements like proper heading hierarchy, descriptive links, and sufficient colour contrast also directly benefit your SEO.
73Page Depth Distribution: Audit how your total page inventory is distributed across click depths from the homepage. A healthy site has most of its important content within two to three clicks. A site with valuable content buried at five or six clicks is structurally broken.
74Content Freshness: Identify your most important pages and check when they were last updated. Content that is more than eighteen months old and covers topics that change over time is likely providing outdated information and slowly losing its organic rankings.
75Canonical Domain: Confirm your site consistently uses a single canonical domain version, either www or non-www, and that the other version permanently redirects to it. Serving both versions creates duplicate content at the domain level.
76Footer Quality: Audit your site footer. It should include essential links like your privacy policy, terms of service, contact details, and key navigation categories. A high-quality footer improves crawlability and user experience simultaneously.
77Cookie Compliance: Review your cookie consent mechanism to ensure it complies with GDPR, CCPA, and any other applicable regulations for your audience’s geographic location. Non-compliance carries legal risk and erodes visitor trust in your brand.
Section 4|
Design Audit Checklist
(Points 78–99)
Design is not decoration. It is the silent salesperson on every page of your website. Bad design destroys trust before a single word is read. Great design creates credibility, guides attention, and makes conversion feel effortless. These 22 points audit your site’s visual language.
78First Impression Test: Ask three people outside your industry to look at your homepage for five seconds and describe what your company does and who it serves. If their answers are vague or wrong, your design is failing to communicate your brand promise fast enough.
79Visual Hierarchy: Review each key page and ask whether the design naturally guides the eye from the most important element to the next. The heading, subheading, supporting copy, and CTA should create a clear visual flow without the reader needing to think about where to look.
80Brand Consistency: Check that your brand colours, fonts, logo usage, imagery style, and tone of voice are consistent across every page of your site. Inconsistency creates subconscious doubt about your professionalism and reliability in the mind of every visitor.
81Typography Readability: Audit your body text for readability. Minimum 16px font size. Line height of at least 1.5. Line length between 60 and 75 characters. Dark text on a light background. Violating any of these standards actively makes your content harder to read and increases bounce rates.
82Colour Contrast: Test your text-to-background colour contrast ratio using the WebAIM Contrast Checker. WCAG AA compliance requires a minimum ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text. Failing this standard makes your content inaccessible and signals poor design quality.
83White Space Usage: Evaluate how well your pages use white space to create breathing room around key elements. Crowded, information-dense pages feel overwhelming and reduce comprehension. Strategic white space is one of the most powerful tools in professional web design.
84Image Quality: Audit every image on your site for quality, relevance, and authenticity. Stock photos of people in suits shaking hands do nothing for trust or engagement. Real photos of your team, product, office, or clients build connection and credibility far more effectively.
85Hero Section: Review your homepage hero section critically. It is the single highest-impact area of your entire website. It must communicate your value proposition instantly, feature a compelling visual, and contain your primary call to action within the visible area.
86Button Design: Audit your CTA buttons for visual distinctiveness. They should be large enough to tap comfortably on mobile, use a colour that contrasts clearly with the surrounding page, and contain action-oriented text that creates forward momentum.
87Icon and Illustration Use: Check whether your use of icons and illustrations is consistent in style, size, and colour palette across the site. Mixing icon styles, weights, or palettes creates visual noise that undermines the professional quality of your design.
88About Page Design: Audit your About page for both design and content quality. It should feature real photos of your team, tell your genuine brand story, communicate your values clearly, and include a CTA that moves visitors toward the next stage of their relationship with you.
Pro TipYour About page is the second most visited page on most websites. If it reads like a corporate press release and looks like a Wikipedia entry, you are missing a massive opportunity to build connection and trust with potential customers.
89Mobile Design Quality: Review your site’s mobile design not just for functionality but for visual quality. Many sites pass mobile usability tests but still look visually rough on mobile with misaligned elements, poorly scaled images, and spacing that does not adapt gracefully to small screens.
90Page Layout Consistency: Check that similar page types use consistent layouts across your site. Blog posts should all look like blog posts. Service pages should all follow the same structural pattern. Inconsistent layouts create cognitive friction that slows readers down.
91Navigation Design: Evaluate your navigation menu for clarity and visual quality. The active page should be visually highlighted. Dropdown menus should open cleanly and close reliably. Mobile hamburger menus should animate smoothly and be immediately intuitive to use.
92Loading State Design: Review how your site behaves visually while pages and assets are loading. Skeleton screens and loading indicators prevent the jarring layout shifts that frustrate users and increase perceived load time even when actual load time is acceptable.
93Error State Design: Check that your error states, such as form validation errors, failed submissions, and broken states, are designed clearly and helpfully. Unhelpful or invisible error messages are one of the leading causes of form abandonment across all website types.
94Video Background Quality: If you use video backgrounds or embedded videos on your site, check that they are optimised, have accessible captions, and do not autoplay with sound as this immediately destroys the experience for visitors in quiet environments.
95Social Proof Design: Audit the design of your testimonials, case studies, and reviews sections. Testimonials presented with a real photo, full name, company, and specific result are trusted significantly more than anonymous quotes in generic quote boxes.
96Pricing Page Design: If you have a pricing page, audit it for clarity, visual hierarchy, and psychological framing. The recommended plan should be visually highlighted. Features should be presented in a way that makes the value obvious and the decision easy.
97Search Result Appearance: Preview how your pages appear in Google search results using the Google SERP Snippet Optimizer. Your title and meta description are design elements too. They are often the first visual impression potential visitors have of your brand.
98Design-to-Copy Alignment: Review whether your visual design is working with your copy or against it. Strong copy placed in a weak visual context underperforms. Compelling design wrapped around weak copy fails equally. The two must be designed to amplify each other.
99Design Refresh Cadence: Evaluate how old your current design is. Web design trends shift every three to four years, and a site that looked modern in 2020 communicates something very different to visitors in 2026. A dated design silently signals a business that may not be keeping pace with its industry.
99 points. One website. Zero excuses.
A website audit is not a one-time event. Your site changes, your competitors change, and the standards search engines and users hold you to keep rising. Run through this free website audit checklist quarterly to stay ahead of problems before they become crises.
The sites that consistently outperform their competitors are not the ones built by the best designers or the most expensive developers. They are the ones whose owners never stop looking for what can be improved. Start with the section where your site hurts most. Fix it. Then move to the next one. That is how great websites are built.