How to conduct a website audit (with actionable next steps) in 2025

You might think your website is pretty great — but do your customers (not to mention your target audience) agree with you? Cos those guys, they’re not so loyal. In fact, up to 88% of users are less likely to return to your website if they’re less than keen on the user experience. And 40% of visitors will hop right on to another website if yours takes more than three seconds to load.

It’s safe to say we’re a flaky bunch these days.

Whether you’re benchmarking against your competitors, considering a website redesign, or simply wanting a broader overview of your website’s performance, undertaking an audit is well worth the work.

What is a website audit?

The short of it: A website audit is an in-depth, data-driven assessment of the experience your website provides to users and helps you evaluate your site methodically, so you can find new ways to improve it.

The long of it: A website audit is a detailed investigation into your target audience’s experience as they interact with your website. This in-depth analysis evaluates how effectively your website strategy and performance align with your business objectives. The end goal is a list of actionable insights you can implement to boost your website’s overall ROI.

A good website audit delves into the nitty-gritty of how your site is currently functioning, scrutinizing various elements such as speed, user experience, and content quality. Ultimately, the goal of a website audience is to improve your digital experience and identify key parts of the website that could do with some improvement.

Website audits are typically carried by digital teams. You can also work with a digital agency to get a neutral, third-party view of your website’s performance.

(Or, you can use our step-by-step checklist below and let your digital team run the site audit themselves. 😉)

Benefits of conducting a website audit

A website audit aims to identify opportunities to improve your site performance and help you better meet your business goals.

It allows you to look at your site with a fresh set of eyes, and how it’s performing through analytics. With a website audit, you’ll have more clarity around the website projects you’re working on, and which initiatives are most beneficial for furthering your overarching business goals.

A website audit is also a great opportunity to get your team organized and aligned around the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities within your current site strategy, so you can better optimize your roadmap.

They’re an integral part of a successful, long-term website strategy. There are several benefits to running a website audit:

• Measuring your website’s performance
• Sense-checking whether your content is in line with the latest brand guidelines
• Trimming content that's no longer needed, or indeed relevant
• Uncovering your strengths and weaknesses
• Understanding how your user experience stacks up against your competitors
• Improving website performance
• Boosting your SEO
• Garnering insights to guide your website strategy and make data-driven decisions to see better returns from your website project

Let’s hammer that last point home a little more: a site audit helps you focus your website strategy on improvements that are likely to drive the most ROI. Without insights into what you’re doing right (and where you’re going wrong) you’re more likely to waste time on projects that won’t drive meaningful results for your website.

Best of all, these insights will better inform and bolster your strategies — they’ll help you make a truly compelling case for why you should focus on improving one aspect of the site over another. And then, you’ll be able to track and show how your new website initiatives are contributing to wider business goals (cue: serious props from the leadership team. 🙌)

Types of website audits

• Content audit: Got lots of content but not sure it’s working as hard as it could be for you? A content audit is one of the best ways to assess exactly this. Over the course of a content audit, you’ll be taking a close look at individual pieces of content on your website and reviewing both the quality and conversions from content. A content audit is an especially good call if you’re gearing up for a site redesign or migration at any point in the near future. A content audit is especially helpful you’re looking to uncover gaps in your content and figure out just how well existing content meets your audience needs.
• SEO audit: This is where you’ll analyze your site in terms of how well it performs in the SERPs. While you’ll be reviewing some key SEO performance metrics like bounce rate and organic traffic, an SEO audit should also cover on-page elements, like meta tags and headings. You’ll also typically look at performance issues, like page speed, loading times, how well your site is optimized for mobile, and a Core Web Vitals check, all with the aim of boosting your performance in search engines.

💡 Pro tip: There are plenty of tools to help make SEO audits less manual and resource intensive. At Optimizely, our digital team uses site scanners like Screaming Frog and Siteimprove, in conjunction with tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console.

• Technical audit: A technical audit catches any obvious technical or website maintenance issues your dev team will need to address, like crawling and indexing problems, code errors, broken links, redirects that aren’t working properly, etc.
• UX/UI audit: User experience (UX) audits look at how users interact with your website. Using data from heatmaps and session recordings, a UX audit can help you pinpoint usability issues, friction points, and design flaws that frustrate users and have a knock-on effect on your site engagement and retention.
• Competitive site audit: A competitive site audit involves taking your competitors’ websites, and comparing their strengths and weaknesses against your own. You’ll look at all the various elements of their sites, like design, user experience, content strategies, SEO performance, and more. By understanding at a macro-level how your site stacks up against other players in your industry, you can identify more opportunities for improvement, set benchmarks, and adjust your own website strategy to stay competitive.
• CRO site audit: A conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit examines how well your site turns visitors into leads or customers. It evaluates key elements like call-to-actions (CTAs), user flows, and lower-funnel landing pages to identify where users drop off or fail to convert. CRO audits are a great opportunity to A/B test which experience works the best for each visitor segment. Audience insights + experiments = serious conversions. 📈

How long does a website audit take?

Website audits can potentially go on indefinitely, and it depends whether you’re focusing on one aspect of the site or the whole shebang, but limiting them to four to six weeks will reveal some of the key issues to resolve without the time and effort spent spiraling out of control.

Your website audit checklist

Now that we’ve got that covered (and because we love us a checklist), here’s one to guide you through the process of completing a website audit:

1. Prep for your website audit

   Decide on your goals. Before diving into the weeds of gathering data and analyzing your site performance, it’s important to set some clear objectives for your website audit project.
   
   Next, you need to know exactly what you want out of your site audit. In other words, what’s the audit going to help you with? Bear in mind that any goals you set will be specifically tied to your business goals. For example, an ecommerce site might focus on a goal like improving product page load times to cut down on their cart abandonment rate, while a SaaS enterprise could be more focused on improving conversion rates from their lead gen forms.
   
   Here are some sample goals you can choose for your website audit:
   
   🎯 Determine a plan of action to improve your overall website speed
   🎯 Make your site navigation more intuitive for all users
   🎯 Optimize conversion paths across the site
   🎯 Identify outdated content or content that’s no longer aligned with your target audience and business goals
   
   Get the right people involved. Once you’ve figure out your goals and defined some objectives, you’ll then need to work out who exactly to involve in your audit. Who are the key stakeholders, and what are their roles? For large-scale website audits, you might need collaboration from design, IT, marketing and product departments. You might also bring in an external team to lead the website audit.
   
   Set your audit’s scope. Now’s the time to set some parameters around your audit strategy. For example, are you more interested in improving your website’s organic reach, or are you more focused on optimizing user experience? A website audit can cover every aspect of your site, including SEO, conversions, and content or be limited to one part of it, such as page speed. While you’ll likely collect insights across these, and lots of other areas, working out your priorities and goals will help you streamline the auditing process.
   
   Figure out the timeline. We recommend planning out a high-level timeline that covers key milestones across the project.

2. Step 2: Gather key data and insights

   Now, you want to gather data about your website from relevant sources. At this stage, you’re just collecting information — don’t worry about identifying trends or patterns. With the right data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to answer your most pressing questions — and make improvements that move the needle.

3. Step 3: Tackle the technical stuff first

   Run a technical audit to catch site errors, slow-loading pages, or issues with crawling and indexing.
   
   ⚠️ Crawling and indexing issues: Use tools like Google Search Console to see if search engines can properly access and index your pages.
   
   ⚠️ Page speed: Slow loading times can significantly affect both user experience and SEO. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to assess whether large images or excessive scripts are slowing down our pages. If a key product page is taking too long to load, potential customers might abandon the site before they even see what we’ve got to offer. At Optimizely, we’re big fans of Chrome UX Report for tracking our overall Core Web Vitals score and pinpointing any macro issues with our site.
   
   ⚠️ Broken links: Identify and fix any internal or external broken links that could have a negative effect on our ability to rank. We use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl our site and find links leading to 404 errors for pages that no longer exist.
   
   ⚠️ Mobile responsiveness: Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help determine whether users on mobile devices are having a “meh” experience. Addressing these technical issues upfront will provide a solid foundation for the rest of your audit. Other web analytics tools, like Hotjar and Contentsquare can help you spot opportunities for optimization based on how real visitors to your site act.
   
   When it comes to actioning on your audit findings, we recommend tackling some of the more glaring technical issues first, as they can impact your site’s overall performance.

4. Dive into the SEO side of things

   Analyze your SEO performance, including keyword rankings, meta tags, and backlinks. Identify what’s working and where improvements can be made.
   
   Keyword optimization: Are your most important pages targeting the right keywords? Use a keyword tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to analyze your keyword rankings and identify opportunities for improvement. For example, if a blog post isn’t ranking well, you may need to make some tweaks, such as improving navigation with relevant internal links andadding engaging visual content.
   
   Meta tags and headings: The aim here is to check whether all of your search-driven pages have optimized title tags, meta descriptions, and properly structured headings (we’re talking H1, H2, H3, etc.). These elements help search engines understand your content better.
   
   On-page elements: Are your images optimized with alt text? Do your URLs follow SEO-friendly practices? Are you applying Schema markup to help Google better understand what your content is about? By focusing on these on-page SEO tasks, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results and driving more organic traffic.

5. Assess your content quality

   Review content for relevance, engagement, and alignment with your audience’s needs. Check for outdated content or opportunities to optimize for more conversions.
   
   Content relevance: Is your content addressing the current needs of your audience? For instance, if you’re still featuring blog posts on trends from 2020, it might be time for an update.
   
   
   
   Content gaps: Are there any gaps in your content strategy? Maybe your competitors have comprehensive guides on a topic you haven’t covered yet. At Optimizely, we use tools like Clearscope to uncover these types of insights.
   
   Engagement and conversions: Measure how well your content engages your audience and converts them into customers. Look at metrics like scroll depth, engagement rate, and conversion rates from blog posts or product pages. For example, if a page gets decent traffic but has a high exit rate, you might need to rework it to make it more engaging, or add a clear call to action.

6. Evaluate your site’s UX

   Here’s where you assess your site’s overall user experience to ensure it’s intuitive and engaging to the right audience.

   User behavior: Tools like Hotjar can help you understand user behavior on your site. Heatmaps and session recordings reveal where users are clicking, scrolling, or abandoning pages. If your users are dropping off at your pricing page, for example, you might have a UX issue well worth addressing asap.

   Navigation: Ensure that your website’s navigation is simple and intuitive. A confusing or cluttered navigation menu can leave users feeling seriously miffed and lead to higher bounce rates. If users can’t easily find where they’re looking to go, they’re unlikely to convert. Which, speaking of…

   Conversion paths: Review your website’s conversion paths to ensure they’re optimized. Is it easy for users to find what they need, and take the action you’re hoping for? Are lead generation forms easy to access and fill out? If your site has a complex sign-up process, potential customers might abandon the site rather than going to the mammoth effort of completing the form.

   Don’t forget your mobile experience: With the shift to mobile-first indexing, it’s essential to ensure the mobile version of your website offers a smooth experience. If users struggle with pop-ups or buttons that are too small to click, your mobile conversions may suffer. Improving the UX can lead to better engagement, lower bounce rates, and higher conversions across your site.

7. Analyze your competitors’ websites

   Website audits are about your target audience, but remember, when they either leave or never found your site in the first place, they’ve often been pushed away by a poor experience on your website, or a better experience somewhere else. If your target audience are being better served by your competitors, it’s time to do a friendly bit of spying. Some example questions to ask yourself could include:
   
   ❓ What is above the fold?
   ❓ Who are they targeting?
   ❓ What features/products do they describe and how?
   ❓ What feelings does their homepage elicit?
   ❓ What elements are included (CTAs, proof points, etc.)?
   ❓ What do you like about their site?
   ❓ What don’t you like about their site?

8. Implement changes and monitor the results

   Once you’ve gathered up your mounds of data and bundled it up into an audit doc, you’ve reached the most important point – putting your recommendations into action. Because that document will do nada, zilch, for you, if you don’t translate it into action.
   
   As you’re preparing your audit findings, be sure you’re distilling these into actionable steps. We recommend creating a high-level summary so it’s easy for stakeholders to understand what your website’s doing right, and where it could do better.
   
   What’s going well. Why not kick things off on a positive note? If you recently improved your product page’s load speed and saw a 20% uptick in engagement, don’t be afraid to shout about it.
   
   What needs improvement. The bulk of your website audit report will be focused on improvements. Be practical with your recommendations and address the root cause of the problems you see. For instance, if your CMS is creating unnecessary code bloat and slowing down your site’s performance, it might be time to migrate to a more efficient one. Be sure to provide clear action items, such as revising code, updating plugins, or switching platforms.
   

   Remember — each improvement you make to your website adds up. A website audit should be more than just a laundry list of problems — it needs measurable outcomes. Defining your KPIs ensures that findings lead to tangible improvements. Metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, and engagement rate help assess whether users are engaging effectively with your site.

   By setting up custom events in Google Analytics in conjunction with using experimentation tools like Optimizely, you can track how changes in site design, content, or functionality influence key behaviors, providing a clear before-and-after comparison of site performance. This data helps pinpoint problem areas and will guide your ongoing website optimization efforts.

9. Repeat regularly

   Wondering how often you need to run a website audit? While there are no hard-and-fast rules, and it will largely depend on your capacity and the size of your website, our vote is to do this annually, at minimum.

   (Or even biannually or quarterly, if you can swing it.)

   If the past few years have shown us anything, it’s that our businesses change fast — your site traffic might be up as you increase paid ad spend on social, but if your conversion rate is going down due to a poor user experience, you’ll want to act, stat.

   Actually, let’s contradict ourselves here — don’t wait for your next website audit before making any improvements. The goal is continuous optimization. You can do a surface-level website audit, which looks at the best and worst-performing parts of your website, or do a comprehensive audit of every element of your site.

   Keep a close eye on those website metrics we talked about earlier, and respond quickly when you see issues crop up on the website that’s having an adverse effect on these. Use this checklist each time to give you a repeatable framework for evaluating and auditing your website.

A little tip before you go: Document e v e r y t h i n g

Your website audit is only effective if the insights you’ve managed to glean are properly communicated, actioned on, and measured over time. Keeping a record ensures that all of your findings lead to actionable improvements… rather than dying a slow death in a spreadsheet somewhere.

Maintaining a website audit report that includes key findings, issue severity, and proposed solutions will all help the teams involved (whether marketing, development, or product) prioritize which improvements to make.

We also highly recommend creating a feedback loop where past website changes are revisited to see the impact they’ve made. For that feel-good factor, yanno? 😊