Most advice about auditing a website is written for people who already know how to audit a website. This is not that. This is the actual list, in the order it is worth doing, with a plain answer for each on what "good" looks like.

You need a laptop, a phone, and about ninety minutes.

1. How fast does the page load?

Not "does it feel fast to you" — you have visited it a thousand times and your browser has half of it saved. Measure it, on a connection like your customers'.

Good: the main content appears in under 2.5 seconds. Needs work: 2.5 to 4 seconds. Problem: over 4 seconds.

Note both numbers people quote: how long until something appears, and how long until the page has stopped moving. A page that draws instantly and then jumps around for three seconds as images arrive is a page people mis-click on.

2. Does it work on a real phone?

Not the phone view in your browser's developer tools. An actual handset, held in one hand, on mobile data.

Three things to look for:

  • Sideways scrolling. If you can push the page left and right, something on it is wider than the screen. It is almost always one image or one table.
  • Text you have to zoom to read.
  • Buttons and links too close together to hit reliably with a thumb.

More than half your visitors are on a phone. This check is not optional and it is the one most often skipped, because the person checking is sitting at a desk.

3. Is Google actually allowed to see it?

This sounds absurd and it is startlingly common. A site is built on a staging server with search engines blocked so the half-finished version does not get indexed — and then goes live with the block still on.

The symptom is a site that ranks for nothing at all, not even its own business name.

Check: visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for a line saying Disallow: /. Then search Google for site:yourdomain.com — if it returns nothing, something is blocking it.

4. Does every page have a title and a description?

The title is the blue link in search results. The description is the grey text under it. Between them they are the entire advert for your page, and they are frequently either missing, duplicated across every page, or left as whatever the theme's demo content said.

Good: every page has its own title, roughly 50–60 characters, that says what the page is and includes the words someone would search for. Every page has its own description, roughly 150 characters, that gives a reason to click.

"Home | My Business" is a wasted title. So is a description that repeats the title.

5. Is the heading structure sane?

Each page should have exactly one main heading — the h1 — that states what the page is about. Everything below it should be subheadings in descending order, without skipping levels.

This matters for two audiences: search engines use it to work out what the page covers, and screen readers use it to navigate. A page where the h1 is the company logo and the real heading is styled body text reads, to both, as a page about nothing.

6. Is the security certificate right?

Four separate things, and sites routinely pass three:

  • The address starts with https.
  • The certificate is valid and matches the domain.
  • It is not about to expire. Under 30 days is worth acting on now.
  • The http version redirects to https rather than serving an insecure copy.

The last one is the one that gets missed. Two working versions of your site at two addresses splits your search rankings between them, and one of the two shows visitors a "not secure" warning.

7. Does it look like a real business?

A stranger who has never heard of you spends a few seconds deciding whether you are legitimate. They are looking, mostly unconsciously, for:

  • A privacy policy — increasingly a legal requirement, and its absence is noticed.
  • A current copyright year in the footer. "© 2019" says the business may not exist any more.
  • A real address, or at least a town.
  • No software version numbers on display. A footer announcing which version of which platform you run is a shopping list for anyone looking for unpatched sites.

8. Can a customer actually contact you?

This is the check almost every audit tool skips, and it is the one most directly connected to money.

  • Can you find a phone number without scrolling?
  • On a phone, does tapping it start a call? A number typed as plain text does nothing when tapped, and most people will not copy it out by hand.
  • Is there a contact form, and — this is the important half — does it arrive? Send yourself one. Broken contact forms are extraordinarily common and completely invisible until somebody checks.
  • Is there one obvious next step on the homepage, or does the visitor have to decide for themselves what to do?
  • Are your opening hours anywhere?

9. What does it look like when someone shares it?

Paste your homepage address into WhatsApp, Slack or a private social post — anywhere that previews a link. You should get a card with an image, your page title and a sentence.

If you get a bare blue link, or an image of your logo cropped badly, every share of your site is quietly less clickable than it should be. This is one image and two lines of markup to fix, and it affects every link anyone ever posts.

10. Write it all down, in priority order

You now have a list. Do not work through it in the order you found it. Sort it by what is costing you customers:

  1. Anything broken. A contact form that does not deliver, an expired certificate, a site Google cannot see. These are emergencies.
  2. Anything blocking a sale. No phone number, no call to action, unusable on a phone.
  3. Speed. Rarely an emergency, always worth money.
  4. Search visibility. Titles, descriptions, headings — cheap to fix, slow to pay off, worth starting early for that reason.
  5. Polish. Trust signals, link previews.

Against each item, note whether it is something you can do yourself or something to hand to whoever maintains the site. That distinction is what turns an audit into a plan — a list of twenty problems with no owner is a list nobody starts.

Where a tool helps and where it does not

Three of these ten checks want precise measurement: speed, the certificate, and whether anything is technically hiding you from search engines. Those are worth automating, because a human estimate is not good enough and the details are fiddly.

The rest are judgement, and judgement is what you have that a tool does not. No scanner can tell you whether your homepage explains what you sell. Run the measurable half automatically, then spend your ninety minutes on the half that needs a person.