Free website audit: what to check yourself in ten minutes, and what a tool sees that you cannot
By MarketWar OS ·
Most free website audits are a form with a progress bar. You give an email, a report arrives, and it contains advice that would be true of any site on the internet with your domain pasted into the header.
A real one tells you things it measured on your page, with the numbers attached. Here is how to do the manual half yourself, and what genuinely needs a machine.
The eight you can check by hand
1. Does the address bar say Not Secure? If your site is not on HTTPS, fix that before anything else on this list. It is usually free with your host and takes an afternoon.
2. Load your homepage on 4G with the wifi off. Not on your office broadband. Count to three. Is there something readable and useful on screen?
3. Read the browser tab. That is your title tag, and it is what appears in search results. If it says "Home" or "Untitled", you have found a free win.
4. Can you tap your phone number? On a phone, on your own site. If nothing happens, it is an image, and it is invisible to both customers in a hurry and to search engines.
5. Show the top of the page to somebody for five seconds. Ask them what you sell and who for. Most owners are surprised by the answer.
6. Count the fields on your contact form. Every one past three costs you enquiries. Name, contact, message.
7. Look for evidence. Names, photographs, reviews, a town, a number of years. Not adjectives.
8. Type your business name and your town into Google. If you are not on the first page for your own name, something is properly wrong.
The four that need something to read the page for you
These are not judgement calls, they are facts about the HTML, and you cannot see them by looking:
The meta description — present, and does it read like a sentence a person wrote, or like a list of keywords.
The heading structure — exactly one H1, in a sensible order. Two H1s or none confuses what the page is about.
Image alt text — how many images have none. This is accessibility first and search second, and both matter.
robots.txt, sitemap.xml and structured data — whether search engines and, increasingly, AI assistants can work out what your business is, where it is and what it sells.
How to tell a real audit from a lead form
Three questions.
Does it give you anything before it asks for your email? A tool confident in what it found shows you some of it.
Does it quote numbers from your page — the actual milliseconds, the actual character count of your title — or does it use bands like "slow" and "needs improvement"?
Does it say what it could NOT measure? Pages that render entirely in JavaScript hide most of this from a simple fetch. An honest report says so; a dishonest one counts what it could not see as a failure and sells you the fix.
Ours
We run a free one that reads your actual page and gives you the score and the three worst findings with no email at all, then tells you exactly how many others it measured. No account, no card.
It is the same engine our paying customers use. It is outside the login because showing you three true things about your own site is worth more than any claim we could make about ourselves.
What to do with the findings is in the main piece. If the audit says you are invisible rather than unpersuasive, start here instead.