A website audit checklist that starts with what actually breaks

Website audit checklists have an inflation problem. Search for one and you get 80 items with no indication which of them matter, so people work top to bottom, fix seven trivial things, and never reach the one issue that was actually costing them traffic.

This is the short version, ordered by damage. If you only do the first three, you will have found most of what is wrong with a typical site.

1. Can Google actually crawl and index the pages?

Everything else is decorative if this is broken. A single misplaced line in robots.txt or a stray noindex tag left over from staging can remove an entire section from search, and nothing about the site will look wrong to you.

• Check robots.txt for blanket disallow rules that outlived their purpose.
• Search your templates for `noindex`. Staging leftovers are the classic cause.
• Confirm canonical tags point at the URL you want indexed, and not at a redirect.
• Compare your sitemap URL count against what Search Console reports as indexed.

2. How slow is it, on a phone, on mobile data?

Not on your laptop on office wifi. Speed problems are almost always mobile problems, and the usual culprit is boring: oversized images. A 4000 pixel photo displayed in an 800 pixel slot wastes 80 percent of its bytes on every single visit.

CodeAiMan's website speed guide works through the diagnosis properly, and siteIQ runs the performance test and tells you which assets are responsible rather than just handing you a score.

3. Is HTTPS correct everywhere, not just on the homepage?

Mixed content is the trap here. The page loads over HTTPS but pulls an image or a script over HTTP, and browsers either block it or flag the page as not fully secure. Users notice the warning long before you do.

4. Do the same page and its variants resolve to one URL?

A site reachable at four addresses is four sites as far as a crawler is concerned. Pick one canonical form and 301 the rest.

5. Are titles and meta descriptions being truncated?

Titles get cut around 60 characters and descriptions around 155 to 160. Over the limit is not an error, it is silent truncation, usually mid-sentence in the search result where it does the most damage to your click-through rate.

6. Does it work with a keyboard?

Tab through the site without touching the mouse. If you cannot reach the navigation, submit the form, or see where focus currently is, the site is unusable for a real group of people and increasingly a legal exposure. Accessibility reporting is part of what siteIQ checks automatically.

7. What is linking to you, and is any of it toxic?

Backlinks are worth auditing in both directions. Losing a link that was driving traffic matters, and so does accumulating links from sites you would not want to be associated with. Automated backlink analysis makes this a five-minute job rather than a spreadsheet exercise.

8. Is structured data present and valid?

Invalid structured data is worse than none, because it can suppress the rich results you added it for. Validate rather than assume. The full list of what to check is in CodeAiMan's technical SEO checklist.

9. Are you measuring anything?

A surprising number of sites have analytics installed twice, or installed on the homepage only, or firing before consent in a way that invalidates the data. Verify that what you are looking at is real before you make decisions from it.

Doing this without a spreadsheet

All nine can be checked by hand and it takes a couple of hours per site. Running them automatically takes minutes, which is the entire argument for using an audit tool: not that it finds things you could not, but that you will actually re-run it next month.

siteIQ covers SEO analysis, performance testing, security checks, accessibility reports, backlink analysis and infrastructure insights in one pass. It is built by CodeAiMan, who also do this as a service through their technical SEO practice if you would rather hand it over.

Frequently asked questions

Referenced in this article