When you’re using a bad website that belongs to someone else, it’s usually very obvious.
As a visitor, you want to complete the job that you arrived on the website to do as quickly and easily as possible. If the site makes any of that journey slow, difficult or illogical you’ll remember it as a bad experience, and if there’s another way to get the job done next time, you’re likely to choose that instead.
That’s your experience as a consumer. What happens if you’re on the other side? You might have a website that’s newly launched, or be several revisions in, but if you haven’t taken a recent audit, you have no way of knowing how it’s perceived by the people using it.
This article will explain how to get a simple and accurate picture of your website performance for the metrics that matter, giving you a clear picture of what needs to improve and what’s already working well.
First, ask what, and who, is my website for?
Revisiting the fundamentals of what your website is supposed to do, and who you built it to serve, can be a surprisingly deep source of insight.
Start your audit with these simple questions:
- Who are your website’s main audiences? (Don’t forget that includes search engines as well as humans)
- What means will they use to find your website, e.g. Google searches, social media activity?
- What do you want each of those audiences to do when they arrive, e.g. read about a product and then buy it, donate to a charity, etc.
- How easily can they do it? Are there any barriers that will stop them completing the actions you want them to?
Answer these questions in as much detail as you can and you’ve just created step one of your website improvement plan.
Look at your website like a first-time visitor
Websites are like children. Whether you’ve spent years nurturing it or it’s a newborn, it will embody your ideas, hopes and dreams. One of the hardest parts of auditing it will be putting yourself in the place of someone encountering it for the first time, and possibly finding that it’s awkward and ugly.
You know what your terminology means, you know what you put in the navigation and where it’s intended to take you, and you know why you organised your pages the way they are. All of this will have made absolute sense based on what you know about your company.
A new visitor doesn’t, and that’s a difficult thing to fake an understanding of. Open your homepage and ask what somebody could understand within the first few seconds.
Can they immediately tell what you sell or provide? Is it obvious who you work with? Can they see why they should choose you? Is there a clear next step?
Then repeat the exercise on important landing pages (if you don’t know which ones are most popular, see our article on free analytics tools). Someone arriving from Google may never see your homepage at all, so every page needs to make sense in isolation, whether that’s by doing a job itself or just by making it easy to visit other pages.
Internal language is also a common problem here. Businesses naturally organise websites around their own departments, products and terminology, while customers tend to think in terms of problems, needs and outcomes.
A good website can bridge that gap, but not without the conscious effort needed to talk about the Weekly Net Usage Statistics, not the WEENUS.
Check whether people can actually find things
Navigation is easy to overlook because regular users learn their way around a website, and that includes you and your staff. New visitors don’t have that advantage, and aren’t guaranteed to take the route that you imagined.
Try to complete some common tasks yourself. Find a particular product, locate a specific service or work out how to contact the right team. Look for pricing, delivery information or a relevant case study.
Count how many decisions and clicks it takes.
You don’t need to obsess over rules such as making everything accessible within three clicks, but important content shouldn’t be too buried.
Search is also worth testing on larger websites, particularly eCommerce sites. Try misspellings, product categories, model numbers and the sort of natural language customers might actually type.
Your website structure also matters to search engines. Clear categories, sensible internal linking and logical page relationships help Google understand which pages are important and what they are about.
Do some Google searches for products or services that you appear for, and see how tempting it is to navigate around the site from the page that you land on. Are related items or services being shown to you there, and are they shown in a way that makes them easy to visit next?
Audit the website on mobile by using a mobile
Checking how your website works on a phone is invaluable. There are tools and tricks that let you experience the phone version from Chrome, but nothing can beat actually clicking your way through it on a real phone.
Are buttons easy to tap? Does anything overlap? Are menus straightforward? Does text feel comfortable to read? Are forms annoying to complete? Do pop-ups cover vital bits of screen?
Pay particular attention to anything that affects conversion.
On an eCommerce website, test category filters, product galleries, variant selection, basket functionality and checkout. On a lead-generation website, fill in the enquiry form yourself.
Mobile traffic represents a substantial part of the audience for most websites, and in many sectors it’s the majority. A frustrating mobile experience isn’t a secondary problem because it’s affecting your primary market.
Look at what your analytics are telling you
Opinions become much more useful when you compare them with actual behaviour. We’ve talked elsewhere about the fact that Google’s Analytics 4 and Search Console are two vital parts of understanding website performance, which is made even more impressive because they’re free.
With the proper setup, Google Analytics 4 can help you identify where people enter the website, which pages they visit and where they complete important actions. Search Console can show which pages appear in Google, what people search for and where rankings or clicks are changing.
Rather than getting distracted by the biggest headline traffic numbers, go in with a list of the key pages that people should be visiting and look for patterns.
Which landing pages attract visitors but generate few enquiries or sales? Where do users seem to drop out? Which high-value pages receive surprisingly little traffic? Are important calls to action being used, and are they properly search optimised?
For an eCommerce site, look at the journey through product views, adding to basket and checkout. A sharp fall at a particular stage can point towards a usability, pricing, delivery or technical issue.
For lead-generation websites, make sure you’re tracking meaningful conversions in the first place. A traffic graph is much less useful if you can’t tell whether any of those visitors contacted you.
Search Google for your own products and services
This is where an SEO audit starts to link commercial and technical site performance. Make a list of the searches a potential customer might use when they need what you offer, then find out whether you appear.
Don’t only search for your company name. If somebody already knows who you are, much of the marketing work has already been done, so you need to think about the “non-branded” searches: the products, services, problems and questions relevant to your customers.
SEO tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs can provide much more comprehensive ranking data, but the really interesting stuff is paid for. Google Search Console shows real queries for which your website has received impressions, though, so that can be a good place to start. It’s linked to your site so you can’t use it to spy on competitors, though.
Look for gaps between what the business wants to sell and what the website is currently visible for.
You may discover that an important service has only a few paragraphs dedicated to it, that multiple pages are competing for the same topic, or that competitors have created useful content around questions you haven’t addressed.
Don’t ignore how search itself is changing
Website visibility isn’t just about appearing first on Google for searches.
Potential customers may encounter your business through Google AI Overviews, AI assistants and other generative search experiences, alongside standard search results.
Being recommended by AI puts even more emphasis on clear, authoritative content.
Your website should make it easy to understand who you are, what you do, where you operate and why your organisation is credible. Important services should be explained properly rather than hidden behind marketing language.
Content that answers genuine questions clearly is valuable to both people and search systems.
This doesn’t mean creating enormous amounts of AI-targeted content. In most cases, improving clarity, depth, expertise and structure is the better starting point.
Check the quality of your most important pages
Not every page deserves equal attention.
Start with pages that generate revenue, attract significant organic traffic or represent strategically important services and products, then compare them with the strongest competing pages.
Is your page easier or more difficult to use? Does it have the right depth of information, and is it clear what the next steps are?
A good service page might explain what the service involves, who it is for, common problems, your approach, relevant experience and what somebody should do next.
A strong product page needs useful descriptions, specifications, imagery, delivery information, returns details and reassurance around purchasing.
Thin pages often exist because as a business, you already understand the subject and assume the customer does too. Some will, but for the ones that don’t, you’ve created a barrier that they might not be motivated to cross.
Test your calls to action
Every important page should have a logical next step.
That doesn’t mean filling the screen with brightly coloured buttons, but it does mean thinking about what someone reading that particular page might realistically want to do next.
They could be ready to buy, but they might also want to ask a question, see examples of your work, compare options, download more information or understand pricing. Calls to action should match their intent as closely as possible.
Also, check the wording. “Submit” tells somebody what a button does technically, but “Request a quote” tells them what happens next.
Small differences in wording can have a significant impact, acting as a prompt to encourage visitors to complete your desired action.
Audit forms and checkout journeys yourself
Forms have an unfortunate tendency to become more complicated over time.
They’re a free way to get essential data on your potential customers, but add enough fields and eventually an enquiry form begins to resemble a mortgage application.
Only ask for information you genuinely need at the current stage.
Then test the form yourself on desktop and mobile. Check validation messages, confirmation pages and automated emails.
If you run an eCommerce website, do the same with checkout. Look for unnecessary friction, confusing delivery options, unexpected charges or anything else likely to make someone hesitate.
Your analytics may tell you that customers are abandoning a process, but it’s only by completing it yourself that you can find out why.
Check website speed – but keep the scores in perspective
Performance matters, as a slow website creates a worse experience and can affect search performance (because Google doesn’t like technically poor websites) and conversion rates.
Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse can identify problems including oversized images, render-blocking resources, layout shifts and slow server responses. If any of those are causing you problems, you’re probably best off talking to an agency.
However, a PageSpeed score isn’t a business KPI.
The aim isn’t to achieve a perfect 100 while ignoring everything else. It’s to make the website feel fast and stable for real users so they want to keep coming back.
Pay particular attention to Google’s Core Web Vitals, but interpret them alongside real-world performance and analytics.
A slightly lower score on a page that converts exceptionally is less urgent than a technically fast page that can’t close a sale.
Look for technical problems
Some website issues are invisible until you deliberately search for them.
An SEO crawl can uncover broken links, missing page titles, duplicate content, redirect chains, pages that search engines can’t access and other structural problems. Screaming Frog is a tool that will do this for you, and it can look at a decent cross-section of pages even in the free version.
You should also check:
- whether HTTPS is working correctly
- whether important pages are indexable (check them in Search Console and you can request a crawl if they aren’t)
- whether old URLs redirect properly
- whether XML sitemaps contain the right pages
- whether canonical tags are being used appropriately
- whether structured data is valid where relevant
Not every warning produced by an SEO tool represents a serious problem, so prioritisation matters. A broken internal link on a major category page deserves more attention than an inconsequential technical warning buried in an unused archive, but you need to know which is which to make that decision.
Review accessibility
Accessibility should be part of website quality, not a separate exercise conducted after everything else.
- Check whether the website can be navigated using a keyboard
- Make sure text has sufficient contrast
- Use meaningful link text
- Provide appropriate alternative text for informative images and proper labels for form fields
Heading structure matters too. Pages should use headings to create a logical hierarchy rather than simply because a particular heading size looks good.
Many accessibility improvements also make websites easier to use generally.
Clearer language, better navigation, well-labelled forms and readable layouts benefit everyone.
Look for trust signals
Before somebody buys or makes an enquiry, they need to feel confident that there is a credible organisation behind the website.
Depending on the business, useful trust signals could include customer reviews, case studies, testimonials, accreditations, recognised clients, guarantees, team information and clear contact details.
The important point is evidence. Almost every business claims to provide excellent service, high quality and expert advice, so those phrases have very little persuasive power anymore.
Showing your successful work, results or expertise behind the claim is much more convincing. Showing that through a third-party service that makes the testimony impartial is even more impressive, and has been shown to improve the strength of the behavioural nudge in website users.
Ask someone else to use the website
One of the most revealing website audits requires almost no specialist software beyond the human brain.
Give someone unfamiliar with the site a task and watch them try to complete it.
Don’t explain where anything is. You might ask them to find a particular service, choose between two products or work out how to contact you. Watch where they hesitate, what they click and what they misunderstand.
Five minutes of observing a new user can reveal problems that months of looking at the same website have made invisible to your internal team.
Compare your website with competitors (carefully)
Competitor research is useful, but copying competitors isn’t.
A competing website might rank well despite being difficult to use. Another might look impressive while performing poorly commercially. You can’t reliably know which of these factors is true, but you can use competitors to identify expectations and opportunities.
How do they structure their services? What questions do they answer? Which search terms do they appear for? What proof do they provide? What features have they introduced that customers might now expect?
Then ask whether those ideas make sense for your own users and objectives.
The aim is to understand the market, not create a slightly different version of somebody else’s website.
Ask your visitors what they think
There are tools that will let you survey your website’s current visitors to find out what they think of the experience.
You can view Heatmaps, which show which areas of the page have the most time spent on them, and even replay sessions to see where the cursor went and what users tried to click on.
Hotjar (now called Contentsquare) is a free service that will let you access this data, and offers even more if you want to pay for it – just remember to cancel once you have enough data to support your decision-making.
Turn your audit into priorities
A website audit can easily produce a spreadsheet containing hundreds of recommendations, and that isn’t necessarily useful.
The important part is deciding what to do first.
We normally suggest considering three things: how serious the problem is, how much commercial impact fixing it could have and how difficult it will be to resolve.
That helps separate urgent opportunities from nice-to-have improvements.
An audit should result in a roadmap, not just a list of faults.
So, is your website actually nice to visit?
There isn’t one score that can answer that question.
Website quality is a combination of visibility, usability, technical performance, content and commercial effectiveness.
The best websites aren’t necessarily the flashiest ones. They make it easy for the right people to find them, understand them, trust them and take the next step.
And importantly, they keep auditing and improving.
Analytics, search behaviour, competitors and technology will all change. The website you launched three years ago might still look perfectly presentable while quietly becoming less effective because the field it’s playing on has changed.
Regular auditing gives you a way to spot those changes before they become bigger problems, and should become part of your regular maintenance routine.
Want another pair of eyes on your website?
At Webselect, we design, build and optimise websites with a focus on what they actually need to achieve.
That can mean improving organic search visibility, fixing conversion problems, simplifying user journeys or identifying when an existing website has reached the point where incremental improvements are no longer enough.
If you’re not sure whether your website is performing as well as it should and can’t make time for regular audits yourself, we can help you find out if your site is doing all it can to support your business.
