What is a website audit and what does it check
What is a website audit
A website audit is a structured health check of your site. Instead of guessing why traffic is flat or why visitors leave without buying, an audit looks at the site the way Google and your customers actually experience it, then tells you exactly what is holding it back.
Think of it like a service inspection for a car. Everything might look fine from the driver's seat, but under the bonnet there can be a slow leak draining your results month after month. For an SME, that leak is usually measured in lost enquiries, abandoned carts, and rankings that quietly slip away.
A good audit produces two things: a clear picture of the current state of your site, and a prioritised list of what to fix first.
What a website audit checks
A complete audit covers several areas, each tied to a real business outcome.
- Performance and Core Web Vitals — how fast pages load and respond. Google measures this through LCP, INP, and CLS, and uses it as a ranking factor. Slow pages lose both positions and impatient visitors. If this is new to you, our guide on Core Web Vitals explains the three metrics in plain language.
- SEO — whether search engines can find, understand, and rank your pages. This covers titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, internal links, sitemaps, and structured data.
- Mobile and responsive design — how the site behaves on phones, where most traffic now comes from. Tiny tap targets, overflowing text, and layouts that break are common and costly.
- Security and HTTPS — whether the connection is encrypted, certificates are valid, and there are no obvious vulnerabilities. Browsers now warn visitors away from sites that are not secure.
- Accessibility — whether people using screen readers or keyboards can actually use the site. Beyond being the right thing to do, it widens your audience and reduces legal risk.
- Broken links and errors — dead pages, 404s, and broken images that frustrate visitors and waste the crawl budget search engines spend on your site.
- Indexability — whether your pages are even eligible to appear in search at all. A single misconfigured setting can hide an entire site from Google.
Why it matters for an SME
Large companies have teams watching these metrics every day. Most small and medium businesses do not, which means problems can run for months before anyone notices the symptoms in the sales figures.
The cost is rarely dramatic. It is gradual. A site that loads in five seconds instead of two loses a chunk of visitors before the page even appears. A page that Google cannot index simply does not exist for anyone searching. A checkout that breaks on mobile quietly turns ready buyers away.
An audit matters because it converts vague worries — "I feel like the site could do more" — into a specific, fixable list. It tells you where your money and attention will have the biggest return, instead of spreading effort thinly across things that do not move results.
It is also the honest starting point before you spend on ads or a redesign. There is little sense paying to send traffic to a site that is leaking it.
How to run a website audit
You can get a long way for free. The fastest route is to combine a few tools:
- Google PageSpeed Insights — for performance and Core Web Vitals, with real-world data where available.
- Google Search Console — for indexation, search performance, and crawl errors. This is essential and free.
- A broken-link checker — to surface dead pages and missing images.
- A mobile test — open the site on your own phone and try to complete a purchase or enquiry.
These tools each show one piece of the puzzle. The challenge is putting them together into a single, prioritised picture — which is exactly what a dedicated audit tool does. The free Lanoar website audit scans performance, SEO, mobile, security, and indexability in one pass and returns a ranked list of issues, so you are not stitching five reports together by hand.
How to act on the results
A report is only useful if it changes what you do next. The trick is sequencing.
Start with what blocks everything else. If pages are not indexable, no amount of speed or design work will help — fix visibility first. If your site is not on HTTPS, that comes next, because it affects trust and rankings across the board. If you suspect Google simply cannot see you, our article on why your site does not appear on Google walks through the usual causes.
Then fix what costs you customers. Slow loading, broken mobile layouts, and dead checkout links directly lose sales. These usually deliver the fastest, most visible return.
Finally, refine. Accessibility improvements, deeper SEO work, and content structure compound over time. They matter, but they sit below the urgent fixes.
Be wary of vanity scores. A green badge is satisfying, but the goal is more visitors, more enquiries, and more sales — not a perfect number. Tie every fix back to a business outcome and you will spend your effort well.
A website audit is the cheapest, fastest way to find out what your site is doing wrong before it costs you more. At Lanoar, we build, optimise, and audit sites for SMEs across Europe — and you can start right now with our free website audit to see exactly where yours stands.