Getting found
What does a website audit actually check?
The twelve things worth measuring on a page, what each one costs you when it fails, and how to tell a real audit from a lead-capture form with a progress bar.
How MarketWar handles it
Checks that could NOT be read from the response — a page that renders entirely in JavaScript, for instance — are listed separately and never counted as failures. Scoring something we could not see is how these tools sell people fixes for problems they do not have, and it is why a report of 17 measured checks says 17 rather than implying hundreds.
An audit is a fetch and a parse. Everything it can honestly tell you comes from what the server actually returned, and everything beyond that is somebody's opinion wearing a percentage sign.
The twelve worth measuring
Reachability. HTTPS, the HTTP status, and how many milliseconds the server took to answer. A browser warning above your contact form is not something the copy recovers from.
What search engines read. The title tag, the meta description, exactly one H1 in a sensible order. A title that says "Home" is a free win nobody has taken.
Whether it works on a phone. The viewport meta tag, and whether the content is in the HTML rather than assembled by scripts.
Whether anything can be read by a machine. Image alt text, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and structured data describing what the business is and where. That last one increasingly decides whether an AI assistant can name you at all.
The check that is missing from most tools
What could not be measured.
A page that renders entirely in JavaScript hides most of this from a simple fetch. A dishonest report counts those as failures and sells you the fix. An honest one lists them separately and says the response could not be read — which is a different problem, and a more important one.
How to tell them apart
Three questions. Does it show you anything before asking for an email? Does it quote numbers from your page, or bands like "needs improvement"? Does it say what it could not see?
Try it
Ours is free and needs no account. Score and the three worst findings immediately, and it tells you exactly how many others were measured rather than implying there are hundreds.
Related: why your business is invisible to AI assistants.
What the numbers mean when you get them
Time to first byte over 600ms — the server is thinking too long. Usually hosting, sometimes a plugin, occasionally a database query nobody has looked at since launch.
A title over 60 characters — it will be truncated in results, so the last words are decoration. Put the town and the service in the first 50.
No meta description — the search engine writes one from the page, and it is usually a fragment of your navigation.
More than one H1, or none — the page has not said what it is about in the one place a machine looks for it.
Images without alt text — invisible to screen readers, invisible to image search, and a straightforward accessibility failure.
What an audit cannot tell you
Whether your prices are right. Whether your offer is compelling. Whether the people arriving are the people who buy. Those need a conversation with customers, and no tool substitutes for it.
What this does not do
It reads one page as delivered. It does not crawl your whole site, judge your copy, or know whether your prices are competitive.
Common questions
What should a website audit check?
At minimum: HTTPS, server response time, title and meta description, exactly one H1, mobile viewport, image alt text, robots.txt, sitemap.xml and structured data. A report missing those is not an audit.
Are free website audits trustworthy?
Some are. The test is whether it quotes numbers it measured on your page — the actual milliseconds, the actual character count — or gives you banded advice that would be true of any site with your domain pasted in.
How long should an audit take?
Seconds. Fetching a page and parsing it is cheap, which is why so many companies give it away. What costs money is fixing what it finds.
Related
Why AI assistants never mention your business
When somebody asks an assistant for a plumber in their town, something decides which names come back. What it reads, why most small business sites are invisible to it, and what you can actually change.
How do you resize one ad for Instagram, Stories and a banner without it looking stretched?
Why an ad squeezed into a story looks wrong, what each platform actually covers with its own interface, and how to lay one design out for five placements without regenerating the artwork.
Why your ad text is harder to read than you think
Contrast ratios, the amber-on-white trap, and why the person who made the ad is the last person who can tell. What to measure and what the numbers mean.