A person checking items off a printed website audit checklist beside a laptop showing a website

Audits  ·  July 12, 2026  ·  Jacob Gerrish

Website AuditSEOChecklistDiagnostics

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

Introduction

You don’t need to hire anyone to find out whether your website has obvious problems. This website audit checklist covers the twelve checks that catch most of them — the same territory a professional site audit covers, at the depth an afternoon and free tools allow. Work through it honestly and you’ll know more about your site than most owners ever do.

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.
  2. Mobile experience. Open your site on an actual phone. Can you read everything without zooming? Do buttons work with a thumb?
  3. Indexing. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Are your important pages there? Is anything embarrassing there?
  4. Broken links. Click through your own navigation and footer. Every dead link is a small leak of trust and ranking signal.
A marketer running a website speed test on a large monitor with a results chart visible

Search visibility (checks 5–7)

  1. Titles and descriptions. Does every page have a unique, descriptive title that a customer would actually click? Or does half your site say “Home”?
  2. The money search. 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?
  3. 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)

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
Two colleagues reviewing a prioritized list of website fixes on a whiteboard

Local and off-site (checks 10–11)

  1. Google Business Profile. Is it claimed, complete, photographed, and reviewed? Is your name, address, and phone identical everywhere it appears online?
  2. Reviews. Count them, read the worst ones, check whether anyone responded. Recency matters as much as the average.

The 2026 check most audits skip (check 12)

  1. 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.

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.

Keep Reading

The DIY pass finds the obvious problems. The $199 SEMPITE Brand Audit finds the rest — with real data and a prioritized fix list.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do I audit my website myself?

Work through a structured checklist: speed and mobile experience, Google indexing, broken links, page titles, your rankings for key searches, homepage messaging clarity, question coverage, Google Business Profile completeness, reviews, and how AI assistants like ChatGPT describe you. Free tools cover all twelve checks at a basic level.

What tools do I need for a website audit?

Free ones cover the basics: Google PageSpeed Insights for speed, a site: search for indexing, Google Search Console for queries and errors, your own phone for mobile testing, and ChatGPT or Perplexity for AI visibility. Professional audits add crawlers, rank trackers, and backlink data on top.

How often should I audit my website?

Run a light checklist pass quarterly and a full audit annually — or after any redesign, migration, or sustained traffic drop. Sites change, competitors move, and search behavior shifts (AI answers being the big current one), so an audit is a habit, not a one-time event.

What does a page audit check?

A page audit applies the same review to a single page: load speed, mobile rendering, title and meta description, heading structure, messaging clarity, internal links, and whether the page answers the searcher's question directly. It's the right scope for a homepage or a key landing page.

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