How to run a website audit and find what is wrong

Is your website running but not giving you the results you were hoping for? Or do you have data available but are not sure how to make full use of it to understand what is going wrong? Knowing how to audit your website is what bridges that gap. It takes you from looking at numbers to knowing which specific problems to fix and in what order. This article walks through each part of a website audit so you can find exactly what is holding your site back.

A website audit is not a technical exercise reserved for developers. It is a structured way of finding which specific problem is costing you traffic or conversions. Websites rarely fail across the board at once. They fail in one or two specific areas, and those failures often go unnoticed for months because the site still looks normal from the outside. The audit gives you a systematic way to surface what is invisible to a casual visitor but visible in your analytics, your search rankings, and your conversion data.

Before you start, be clear about what you are measuring against. A site that gets zero traffic has different priorities than a site that gets traffic but converts none of it. The four audit areas below apply to every site, but how you weight them depends on your current situation.

What a website audit covers

A complete website audit touches four distinct areas. SEO and indexing tells you whether search engines can find your pages and whether those pages have any chance of ranking for searches your audience is running. Page speed tells you how fast your site loads and whether that speed is costing you visitors before they see anything. Content and conversion tells you whether visitors who do arrive are being given clear reasons to stay and take action. Technical health tells you whether there are structural problems, such as broken links, duplicate content, or mobile usability errors, that quietly undermine the other three areas.

None of these areas operates in isolation. A fast site with no keyword targeting still gets no organic traffic. A well-optimized site with broken links and slow mobile performance loses visitors before they convert. Working through all four areas gives you a complete picture, and the specific findings tell you where to spend your time first.

How to audit your website for SEO and indexing issues

If your site is not getting organic traffic from search engines, the problem usually sits in one of three places: your pages are not indexed, something is blocking search engine crawlers, or the pages that are indexed are not targeting the keywords your audience actually searches for. Understanding why your website is not showing up on Google is often the first question this section of the audit answers.

Check whether your pages are indexed

Indexing means that a search engine has crawled and stored your page in its database. Only indexed pages can appear in search results. A page that is not indexed is, from a search perspective, invisible.

The quickest way to check this is to type site:yourdomain.com into a search engine. The results show you every page from your domain that has been indexed. If you have 50 pages on your site but only 12 appear in the results, 38 of your pages are not being indexed at all. Compare the number of results against the number of pages you know your site has. A large gap is a signal worth investigating.

For a more detailed view, Google Search Console (a free tool from Google) shows you exactly which URLs have been indexed, which have been excluded, and why each excluded page was left out. If you are not already connected to Search Console, setting it up should be your first step.

Check for crawl blocks and noindex tags

Even if you want your pages indexed, something in your site configuration may be telling search engines not to crawl or index them. Two common causes are robots.txt rules and noindex meta tags.

Your robots.txt file, usually found at yourdomain.com/robots.txt, can block search engine crawlers from accessing entire sections of your site. If a developer or platform update added a broad disallow rule, it may be blocking pages you want indexed. Check the file to make sure it is not unintentionally blocking important pages.

Noindex meta tags are placed in the HTML of individual pages and instruct search engines not to index that specific page. These are sometimes added during development to prevent a site being indexed before launch, and occasionally left in after launch by mistake. If a page is not appearing in search results despite being well-structured and linked, checking for a noindex tag is one of the first things to do.

Check whether your pages target keywords people search for

A page that is indexed but not targeting any keyword a real person searches for will not generate organic traffic. This is one of the quieter reasons a site gets no visitors from search despite looking professionally built.

For each important page on your site, identify the primary keyword it targets. Ask whether that keyword reflects how your audience actually describes what you offer. Tools like Google Search Console and free keyword research tools let you see search volumes, so you can confirm whether a phrase people actually type has any volume behind it. If your homepage, service pages, and core content are all targeting phrases with near-zero search volume, that is a keyword strategy problem that no amount of technical optimization will fix. If you are not sure where to start, understanding why your website is not getting traffic covers the full landscape of causes.

How to audit your website for page speed

Page speed is not just a technical metric. It is a direct factor in how many visitors stay on your site long enough to read anything. A page that takes four or five seconds to load on a phone loses a meaningful portion of visitors before it finishes loading. Those visitors do not come back. Understanding why website speed matters makes the case for why this section of the audit deserves serious attention.

Run a speed test on mobile

Speed testing your site on desktop only gives you a partial picture. A significant portion of website visitors arrive on mobile devices, and mobile connections are slower than most desktop broadband. A site that feels fast on your laptop may load painfully slowly on a phone using a normal cellular connection.

Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, available for free at pagespeed.web.dev, tests your site on both mobile and desktop and returns scores along with a detailed breakdown of what is slowing the page down. Enter your homepage URL first, then your most important service page or landing page. The mobile score is the more critical number. A score below 50 on mobile indicates a serious performance problem that is likely affecting your traffic and your search rankings. A score between 50 and 89 means there are improvements to make. A score of 90 or above is the target.

Core Web Vitals are a related set of metrics that measure specific aspects of page experience: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds to the first interaction, and how much the layout shifts during loading. These metrics are used by Google as a ranking factor, so poor scores affect your position in search results, not just your visitor experience.

What to do with the results

PageSpeed Insights lists specific opportunities and diagnostics for each page it tests. The opportunities are ranked by estimated time saving, so the items at the top of the list have the biggest impact.

The most common speed issues found in audits are unoptimized images, render-blocking scripts, lack of browser caching, and third-party scripts that load slowly. Large image files are often the single biggest contributor to slow load times. If your site is loading images that are several megabytes each when they could be compressed to a fraction of that size, addressing the images alone can produce a significant speed improvement.

Render-blocking scripts are files that have to be fully loaded before the page can display anything. These can be reorganized so that essential content loads first and the scripts load in the background. Browser caching allows returning visitors to load your site faster because the browser already has the files stored from the previous visit. Each of these issues is fixable, and most website platforms give you tools or settings to address them without touching code directly.

How to audit your website for content and conversion issues

A site can be perfectly indexed and fast to load yet still fail to produce enquiries, leads, or sales. When traffic arrives but nothing happens, the problem is almost always in the content and conversion layer. This section of the audit looks at whether your pages are giving visitors a reason to stay and a clear path to take action.

Check exit rates and bounce rates on key pages

Exit rate is the percentage of sessions that end on a specific page. Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions where a visitor lands on a page and leaves without interacting with anything else. Both metrics, available in your site analytics, tell you which pages are failing to keep visitors engaged.

A high bounce rate on your homepage or main service pages is a strong signal that something on the page is not matching what the visitor expected when they clicked through. The mismatch could be in the headline, the visual design, the loading time, or the overall relevance of the content to the search term that brought them there.

When reviewing these numbers, focus on your highest-traffic pages first. A 90% bounce rate on a low-traffic page is less urgent than a 70% bounce rate on the page that receives 60% of your sessions. Prioritize by volume, then investigate the specific pages with the highest exit rates to understand what might be causing visitors to leave.

Check whether each page has a clear call to action

Every page on a site should have one primary action you want a visitor to take. On a service page, that might be requesting a quote. On a product page, it might be adding an item to the cart. On a blog article, it might be signing up for a newsletter or reading a related article. If you cannot clearly identify the primary action for a page, your visitors cannot either.

Look at each of your key pages and ask: what is the one thing I want a visitor to do here? Then check whether that action is clearly stated, visually prominent, and easy to find without scrolling past large amounts of text. A call to action buried at the bottom of a long page is effectively invisible to most visitors.

The copy around the call to action matters as much as the button itself. A button that says "Get in touch" alongside a line explaining what happens next, such as "Tell us about your project and we'll respond within one working day," removes uncertainty and gives the visitor a concrete reason to act.

Check whether your copy matches visitor intent

Intent mismatch is one of the most overlooked conversion problems. If a visitor arrives on your page via a search for a specific service and your page immediately pivots to a company overview, you have broken the connection between what they were looking for and what they found.

For each key page, identify the primary search query or traffic source that sends visitors there. Then read the first two paragraphs of the page as if you are that visitor arriving for the first time. Does the page immediately confirm they are in the right place? Does the headline reflect what they searched for? Does the opening paragraph address their specific need, or does it talk about your brand in general terms that could apply to any brand in any industry?

Pages that answer the visitor's specific question in the first paragraph before anything else will hold visitors longer. Pages that open with brand history, mission statements, or vague value propositions lose the visitor's attention before they see why they should stay.

How to audit your website for technical issues

Technical issues sit underneath the visible layer of your site and affect everything from how search engines crawl your pages to how mobile visitors experience your content. Many technical problems are invisible to a human visitor but have a measurable impact on rankings and conversions.

Check for broken links and 404 errors

A broken link leads to a page that no longer exists, returning a 404 error to the visitor and to the search engine crawler. Broken links create a frustrating experience for visitors who click them, and they signal to search engines that a site is not being actively maintained.

Broken links accumulate over time as pages are renamed, moved, or deleted without redirects being set up. Understanding what a 404 error is and how to resolve it is a useful foundation before you run this check. Free tools like Screaming Frog (which crawls your site and lists all URLs, status codes, and broken links) or browser extensions that flag broken links can quickly surface all the broken links on a site.

Once you have a list of broken links, the fix is usually one of two things: either redirect the broken URL to the correct current page using a 301 redirect, or update the link on the page where it appears to point to the correct destination. Leaving broken links unaddressed is one of the easier audit wins to skip over, but it has a cumulative negative effect on both user experience and crawlability.

Check mobile usability

Mobile usability problems are not just about whether a page looks visually acceptable on a small screen. They include issues like text being too small to read without zooming, tap targets being too close together for a thumb to hit accurately, content being wider than the screen and requiring horizontal scrolling, and interactive elements being obscured or overlapping.

Google Search Console has a mobile usability report that lists specific pages on your site that have been flagged with mobile usability errors. This report is the fastest way to find pages that need attention. Running your key pages through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool also gives you an immediate visual check and a list of any usability issues detected.

Mobile usability problems are a ranking factor, meaning Google treats sites with poor mobile usability as lower quality for mobile searches. Since the majority of searches happen on mobile devices, this is not a marginal consideration.

Check for duplicate content

Duplicate content means the same or very similar content exists on two or more URLs on your site. This creates a problem for search engines because they have to decide which version to index and rank, and they often make the wrong choice or split ranking signals between both versions instead of concentrating them on one.

Common causes of duplicate content include pages being accessible at multiple URLs (with and without a trailing slash, with and without www, with http and https), pagination creating near-identical category pages, print versions of pages generating separate URLs, and session IDs being appended to URLs.

The solution for most duplicate content issues is to set a canonical URL for each page. A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL is the authoritative one and should receive the ranking signals. Most website platforms allow you to set canonical URLs at the page level without editing code. Checking that all your pages have canonical tags pointing to the correct URL is a straightforward technical fix with a real SEO benefit.

How WEMASY helps

WEMASY's website builder is built to minimize the technical issues that a website audit typically surfaces. SSL is included and active on every site by default. Mobile responsiveness is built into every template. Canonical URLs, sitemap generation, and meta tag configuration are all manageable without technical knowledge.

For brands that want a site that starts in good technical health rather than needing an audit to surface and fix foundational problems, WEMASY handles the infrastructure layer so you can focus on content and conversion. See what is included across plans on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions