The 12-Point Website Audit Checklist (Run It Yourself)

Why most audit checklists waste your time

The typical audit checklist has two failure modes. The first is bloat: 200-line spreadsheets that flag a meta description three characters too long as “critical” while never asking whether the homepage explains what you sell. The second is vanity: chasing a perfect tool score that no customer and no search engine actually rewards. Practitioners who have audited hundreds of sites converge on the same conclusion — a short list of high-impact checks beats an exhaustive one, because the goal is not zero errors. It’s finding what’s costing you customers right now. That’s the filter for all twelve checks below: each one catches a problem that directly costs visibility or conversions.

The tools you need (all free)

Five things, none of them paid: Google PageSpeed Insights for speed, Google Search Console for indexing and queries (set it up now if you haven’t — it’s the single most useful free diagnostic that exists), your own phone for mobile testing, an incognito browser window for the search checks, and ChatGPT or Perplexity for the AI visibility check. A person who doesn’t know your business is optional but powerful for check 8.

Technical health (checks 1–4)

1. Speed. Run your homepage through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Under 3 seconds to load on mobile is the bar; note the “Largest Contentful Paint” number. Then check your two or three most-visited pages too — the homepage is rarely the slowest.
2. Mobile experience. Open your site on an actual phone. Can you read everything without zooming? Do buttons work with a thumb? Fill out your own contact form — on mobile, start to finish. If anything makes you sigh, it makes customers leave.
3. Indexing. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Are your important pages there? Is anything embarrassing there — staging pages, old promotions, thin tag archives? Search Console’s Pages report shows what’s excluded and why.
4. Broken links. Click through your own navigation and footer. Every dead link is a small leak of trust and ranking signal — and the ones in your main navigation are the expensive ones.

Search visibility (checks 5–7)

5. Titles and descriptions. Does every page have a unique, descriptive title that a customer would actually click? Or does half your site say “Home”? Your title is your ad in the search results; write it like one.
6. The money search. In an incognito window, search for what you sell plus your city (or your niche). Where are you? Who is above you, and what do they have that you don’t — more reviews, better content, a clearer page? That gap is your work list.
7. Your own name. Search your business name. You should own the whole first page — site, profiles, reviews. Anything confusing or missing is costing you customers who were already sold.

Content and messaging (checks 8–9)

8. The five-second test. Show your homepage to someone who doesn’t know your business for five seconds. Can they tell you what you do, who it’s for, and what to do next? That’s a web page audit in miniature — and most sites fail it. Clever taglines and stock-photo heroes are the usual culprits; plain statements win.
9. Question coverage. List the ten questions customers actually ask you. How many does your site answer directly, in a clearly-titled section? Unanswered questions are queries you’ll never rank for — and answers AI engines will source from a competitor instead.

Local and off-site (checks 10–11)

10. Google Business Profile. Is it claimed, complete, photographed, and reviewed? Is your name, address, and phone identical everywhere it appears online? Inconsistent listings quietly erode both local rankings and AI engines’ confidence in your business facts.
11. Reviews. Count them, read the worst ones, check whether anyone responded. Recency matters as much as the average — a 4.8 from two years ago reads as a closed business.

The 2026 check most audits skip (check 12)

12. AI visibility. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions your customers would ask — “best [what you do] in [your area]”, “is [your business] reputable?” Are you in the answer? Described accurately? Missing entirely? This is where discovery is moving, and it’s the check almost every site audit checklist still skips. Our free visibility checker runs a version of it for you automatically.

When to DIY and when to hire

This checklist is the right depth when things are basically working and you want to catch obvious leaks. Hire a professional when the stakes change: traffic or leads dropped and you don’t know why, you’re about to invest in a redesign or a marketing push, or the DIY pass surfaced problems you can name but not diagnose. The honest test: a checklist tells you what is wrong; you pay a professional to tell you why, what it’s costing you, and what order to fix it in. If you already know all three, keep your money.

What to do with the results

Fix in this order: anything broken (links, mobile, indexing), then anything confusing (messaging, titles), then anything missing (question coverage, reviews, AI visibility). If the list feels long, that’s normal — and it’s exactly what a professional audit prioritizes for you. Read what a full website audit covers to see what the deeper version looks at, or skip straight to the SEMPITE Brand Audit and get the whole thing done with real data.