An audit is only worth what you do after you have read it. Most of the audits handed to small businesses never get that far, because “free website audit” is a sales tool with a report attached. This is the buyer’s guide: what the checks really are, which numbers matter, and how to tell a diagnosis from a pitch before you pay for either.
Strip the word apart and an audit is a simple thing: a series of automated checks against your site, plus a human deciding what the results mean. The checking is nearly free. The interpretation is the whole product. Most paid and free audits skip the interpretation and hand you the raw data with a cover on it, so here is one page that gives you both parts.
What an audit actually checks at a glance
Every checklist you ever see, no matter how many points it claims, collapses to six areas. That is useful, because it means you already know what any audit will contain before you pay for it.
| Area | What gets checked | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl | robots.txt is reachable and not blocking Google; a sitemap exists and is submitted | One bad line here hides your whole site from Google |
| Indexing | The pages you want are actually in Google; no stray noindex tags; one canonical per page | Duplicate and accidental pages split whatever ranking the site has |
| Redirects and links | Redirects go straight to the final URL, 404s are real 404s, nothing internal points at dead pages | Chains and broken links waste Google’s visits |
| Speed | Core Web Vitals on mobile, image sizes, fonts and scripts | Slow pages lose phone calls, and it is the one check you can rerun yourself |
| Mobile usability | Tap targets, readable text, usable forms, a sticky call button on a phone | Google indexes the mobile version of your site |
| Security | Valid HTTPS, no mixed content, no signs of compromise | One padlock warning kills form submissions |
Notice what is not on the list: design taste, whether the copy works, whether your prices make sense. A technical audit checks the machine under the site, not the site as a sales tool. Anyone who reads one expecting a design verdict will be disappointed. That judgement is yours to make, not the machinery’s.
The speed numbers that matter
Speed is the only part of an audit with official pass marks, and the only part you can test yourself this afternoon. Google publishes the official Core Web Vitals thresholds, and PageSpeed Insights grades any page against them free, with no login.
| Metric | Good threshold | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| LCP, loading | Under 2.5 seconds | When the main content appears |
| INP, responsiveness | Under 200 milliseconds | How fast the page answers a tap |
| CLS, stability | Under 0.1 | How much the page jumps while loading |
These are Google’s published figures, not an agency’s guess, so a report with fuzzier numbers is doing the same work as you, with better stationery. The real world is still humbling: the 2025 Web Almanac, the yearly state of the web run by HTTP Archive, found 48% of mobile sites passing all three checks, and home pages passing at a lower rate than the site average. The loading check is the one most sites trip over. In the 2024 version of the survey, only 59% of mobile home pages passed it. That metric is the one that loads your first photo and headline, it is usually fixable in about a day, and it is the finding most worth chasing in any report you are handed.
An audit tells you everything that is wrong with your site. A diagnosis tells you which two findings are losing you calls, in order. If the report never gets to the second, it is a sales document.
What the free audit is really for
The free audit is a marketing machine: generate the check, find the problems, present each one as a service the firm sells, then sit down across the table from you. The trick works because the findings are usually right. Your site does have problems. The question is whether those problems are why the phone does not ring, and that is the section a human has to write.
| What you pay | What comes back |
|---|---|
| Nothing, you run the tools | Raw data: PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, a Screaming Frog free crawl. Real numbers, no priorities |
| Nothing, they run it | A report of dozens of findings, then a call where the fixes turn out to be the services they sell |
| About £250 to £600 | The same data, read by a human, with a short list of what is worth fixing first. The only tier worth buying |
| £1,000 and up | The full treatment. Indispensable for a forty page operation with a marketing manager, a luxury for a five page one |
The price anchors are mostly American. WebFX’s pricing survey put the largest single band of paid audits between $101 and $750, and the common cutoff between automated and human work sits around $500 (Neil Patel’s rule: under that, usually an automated export with a logo). In pounds, you are paying for a person, for roughly a day of their time, to read your data and make the decisions. If nobody reads your report, the price is too high whatever it says on the invoice.
How to read an audit before you buy it
Three tells separate a report from a diagnosis.
- No priorities. Dozens of findings in alphabetical order. Ask which three, in order, they would fix first, and notice the pause.
- Every finding needs their service. If finding six happens to be a retainer package the firm sells, you are holding a price list, not a health check.
- Nobody asked what the site is for. A diagnosis needs to know the website’s job. A report that could sit on any client’s desk is a file that sat on every client’s desk.
A real audit finishes with a page that says: these five findings, in this order, for roughly this much, and when to rerun the test. Ask for that one page in writing before you pay.
What an audit will never tell you
The thing the marketing does not want printed: technical audits are fantastic at counting problems and almost useless at judging the problems that matter, and the judgement that matters for a small business website is not a missing tag. It is the pale photos, the copy that reads like a brochure for the sector, the services page that describes the work instead of giving a reason to call.
No technical check answers “why would a customer choose you”. So when the full treatment is on offer, remember what you would be buying: fixes that stop the site being broken, not fixes that make it sell. Those are different jobs, and the consultant who tells you so, at least, is the one showing signs of knowing the difference.
Do this tonight
Twenty minutes gets you the raw material any audit will run on. Open PageSpeed Insights on the phone tab and scan your home page. Open Search Console, go to the pages report, and work through what Google says it crawled and chose not to index. Then read your services page on a phone, tapping every link, and time how long it takes to find the number.
The question to ask when anyone offers you an audit: “Which two findings in this report cost me calls this month?” The person who answers with two fixes in order is worth listening to. The person who says “all of them” is rehearsing a sales call. Ask it before you pay, and you will have everything this page is for.