Website Audit
We send you the findings before you pay us
Every agency says they will audit your site. Ours starts with numbers pulled from your own accounts, sent to you first, with no contract attached. It is the fastest way to find out whether you need us — including finding out that you do not.
Request the audit↓The problem, as we usually find it
What is actually going wrong on most of the sites we are called into — before anything about what we would charge.
Every agency offers an audit. Most of them are a crawler report with the tool's own severity colours left on, delivered after you have signed something.
Ours starts before any of that. You give us read access, we look, and you get the findings — whether or not you go on to hire us. It costs us a few hours and it is the fastest way for both sides to find out whether there is a real job here.
Including finding out that there is not. We have finished audits by telling a client their setup was fine and the money would be better spent elsewhere. That has cost us work, which is roughly how you know the audit is real.
What the work covers
Everything below is included. If something is not on this list, we quote it separately rather than leaving you to find out later.
Technical crawl
Status codes, redirects, indexation, canonicals and the URLs earning clicks that no longer resolve.
Search Console and GA4
What is actually landing, from your accounts rather than a third-party estimate.
Speed and server
Field Core Web Vitals plus the stack underneath them.
Feed and catalogue
For stores: whether what Merchant Center receives matches what the page says.
A written verdict
What to fix, in order, with what it costs — including the items you can do yourself.
Competitor comparison
How your setup differs from the two or three sites actually beating you, on the points that matter.
Analytics and tracking check
Whether the numbers you are already making decisions on can be trusted.
A prioritised fix list
Ordered by what it is costing you, not by a tool's severity colour.
What we have actually found
Real numbers from real accounts. We never publish client names, so the businesses are described rather than identified — the figures are exactly as we found them.
56
real problems across five Merchant Center accounts. Four of the five reported zero issues.
100%
eligible with zero issues on one dashboard — while the store sent menswear to women
22.9 GB
of backups mistaken for media on a site that was about to buy more storage
10,600
of 36,110 issues in a site's own audit tool that had already been fixed and never re-checked
1
phone number shown on a live site that dialled a different number when it was tapped
The detail that decides it
The part most quotes leave out, because it takes experience rather than a price list.
We never take a dashboard number at face value
This is the single most valuable habit we have, and it came from being wrong. Reported health does not predict actual health, and it fails in both directions.
Across five Merchant Center accounts we audited, four reported zero issues. We found 56 real problems between them. One read 100% eligible with zero issues while the store was sending menswear to women. Another read 0.0% eligible for a reason unconnected to any of its five genuine failures.
So every figure gets checked against the thing it claims to describe. Feed price against page price. Reported product count against catalogue count. Cache health against an actual cross-request read, not the plugin's own self-test.
What gets checked
Technical. Status codes, redirect chains, canonicals, indexation, robots directives, and — the one that catches people — the URLs still earning clicks that no longer resolve.
Search Console and Analytics, from your own accounts rather than a third-party estimate. Third-party traffic numbers are modelled and routinely wrong by large multiples.
Speed and server. Field Core Web Vitals plus the stack underneath: PHP, database, opcode cache, object cache, CDN configuration.
Catalogue and feed, for stores. Whether what Merchant Center receives matches what the page actually says.
What you get back
A written verdict with the findings ranked by what they are costing you, not by a tool's severity colour. A crawler will flag a missing meta description on a page nobody visits as an error and stay silent about the redirect that is losing you two thirds of your clicks.
Each finding carries the evidence behind it — the URL, the number, the screenshot where relevant — so you can verify it yourself or hand it to another developer entirely.
And an explicit list of what you can fix yourself for nothing. Usually a third of the list falls into that category, and we would rather you knew.
The findings that have no warning light
Almost everything expensive we have ever found was on a site or an account that reported itself healthy. That is the whole reason this audit exists, and it is why we read the underlying data rather than the dashboards sitting on top of it.
An advertising account that had gone dark mid-month while every campaign read eligible and serving, the account read enabled, and billing was approved. Its budget ceiling had been reached, and no status field anywhere says so. A site whose tracking tag named a different advertising account entirely — twenty-two conversion actions recording nothing for a month, with no warning shown, because a valid tag for *somebody's* account was present.
An SEO plugin showing green on a store where 0 of 261 category pages had a meta description. A coverage query reporting a catalogue fully populated because the filter it used counts an empty value as a value. A theme that had been truncating every hand-written description at 152 characters before Google ever saw one.
None of those are exotic. They are ordinary, they are common, and not one of them appears in a report generated by the tools already installed.
Audit tools go stale, and a stale audit is worse than no audit
One site's own SEO plugin listed 36,110 issues. 10,600 of them were already fixed — the plugin stores its findings in a table and had simply never re-crawled. Acting on that list would have meant a fortnight of work on problems that no longer existed, and it would have looked productive the whole time.
So every finding we report is verified live at the moment we report it, and anything we claim to have fixed is re-checked on a second crawl afterwards. We never claim a fix from the first crawl.
The smallest finding we have made is also our favourite, because it shows what a real look catches that a scan does not. A site displayed one phone number in its header and dialled a different one when the button was tapped — leftover placeholder data from the theme, live for years, on the single most valuable interaction on a mobile page. No crawler flags that. You find it by tapping the button.
What we deliberately do not do
We do not pad the report. A 60-page audit with 200 findings is not thorough, it is a way of hiding that only six of them matter.
We do not blur screenshots of your own dashboards to look mysterious. Blur reads as concealment on a document whose whole argument is that we will show you the real number.
And we do not hold the findings hostage against a signature. You get them either way.
What we need from you
Short, and worth reading before you start. What delays this work is almost never the work — it is waiting on access or a decision.
Read access to Search Console
Non-negotiable — it is the only honest source for what your site actually earns from search.
Read access to analytics
GA4 or whatever you run. We need behaviour, not just acquisition.
Store, hosting or CMS login
Read-only where possible. We will say which specific check needs more than that, and why.
Ad and Merchant Center access, if you run them
Read level. Feed and campaign problems are frequently the largest thing we find.
What you think is wrong
Tell us your theory. We check it properly either way, and knowing it stops us reporting things you already knew.
Whether this is right for you
We would rather lose the enquiry than take work we would do badly, so the right-hand column is as honest as the left.
This is for you if
- You suspect something is wrong but nobody can tell you what
- You are paying an agency and want an independent second opinion
- You are about to spend on a rebuild, ads or SEO and want to know where the money should go
- Your dashboards say everything is fine and your revenue disagrees
This is not for you if
- You want a one-page score to show someone; use a free tool for that
- You cannot give read access to Search Console, Analytics or the store
- You have already decided what the problem is and want it confirmed
- You need it in 24 hours; a real audit takes a few days of actual looking
How it runs
Four steps, in this order, every time.
- You give us read access to Search Console, Analytics and the store or server.
- We crawl, pull and cross-check — the dashboard number is never taken at face value.
- You get the findings and the numbers behind them, whether or not you hire us.
- If there is nothing wrong, we say so. That has happened.
Looking for hosting? This is what we would put you on
We do not sell hosting and we do not resell it, so there is no plan of ours to push you onto. When a client asks where to host, this is the honest answer for most small Indian sites.
Indian data centre
Mumbai is on the list. A site served from India to Indian visitors starts a long way ahead of one served from Singapore.
LiteSpeed, not plain Apache
It ships with LiteSpeed and LSCache, which is most of the WordPress speed problem solved before anyone installs a plugin.
Free SSL and daily backups
Included on the plans we would actually put a client on, rather than sold back to you at renewal.
Priced for a small business
The long term is where it is cheap. Renewal rates are higher than the first-term price, so buy the longest term you are comfortable with.
That is a referral link. Hostinger pays us a small commission if you sign up through it, at no extra cost to you. We recommend it because we run client sites on it, not because of the commission.
The Stack We
Work In Every Day
Every platform below is one we build on, maintain, rank and report from — not a logo wall.
Request the audit
Your name, an email, the URL, and one line on what is going wrong. We reply within one working day, usually with the first findings already attached.
Questions
The first pass of stats is free and comes with no contract. A full written audit is quoted on the size of the site or catalogue.
Then we tell you, and you have an independent second opinion for very little. We would rather say that than invent work.
Read access is enough for most of it. We ask for admin only when a specific check needs it, and we say which check.