How to Do a Website Audit in 5 Steps (+ Checklist)

A website audit helps find the problems that hold your site back. It points out technical issues that affect your rankings and user experience problems that hurt sales.

In this guide, we will walk you through five easy steps to help your site perform better.
And to make it even easier, we have added a free website audit checklist you can follow as you go.

Step #1: Review Your Site Architecture and Navigation

A clear site structure and easy-to-use navigation help both visitors and search engines find what they need. This can improve your rankings and help you get more sales. If people can’t find your products or services, how can they buy them?

Here’s how to check your site’s structure:

Analyze Your Site’s Navigation

See how easily users can move around your site. Your navigation menu should be simple to find, and your site’s layout should make sense.

Ask these questions:

• Is the main menu easy to find? Do the labels clearly show where each link goes?
• Does the search function give correct and useful results?
• Do you link related content together to help users explore your site naturally?

For example, the furniture store Terra Outdoor does this very well.

What do they get right?

Their site has a clean drop-down menu that groups items by product type, material, and collection. This helps shoppers easily find what they want.

Map Your Site Structure

Your content needs good organization so visitors and search engines can understand it easily.
Start by checking your heading structure:

• The H1 tag is the main title of your page. It should be different for each page and clearly explain what the page is about.

Check Your Internal Links

Internal links help visitors move around your site. They also show search engines how your content connects. Good internal linking can also improve your authority on certain topics.

Check if you are linking to:

• Important product or service pages
• Related blog posts
• Pages that help turn visitors into customers

Also, make sure you use clear anchor text, words that explain where the link will take the user.

This not only helps readers but also gives Google more information about your pages.

Step #2: Check Technical Foundation

A technical website check helps see if search engines can easily find, read, and list your pages. Even if your content is great, technical problems can stop your site from ranking well.

For example, a mobile vet service called BetterVet used a technical audit to fix major problems. These problems were stopping search engines from reading their pages. After fixing them, their traffic grew by over 2,000%. This shows that a technical audit can bring real results.

Here’s how to do it:

Check If Search Engines Can Index Your Site

First, find out if search engines can find and list your important pages. Use Google Search Console to check this. Go to “Indexing” > “Pages” and see what pages are indexed.

Look for Crawling Problems

Next, check if search engines can move through your site without issues. Look for broken links, missing pages, or a confusing structure.

You can use Semrush’s Site Audit tool for this. It shows which pages have problems and why search engines might not reach them.

Here’s how:

• Go to Site Audit and open your project.
• Look at the “Crawled Pages” section. It shows pages in these groups:
  • Healthy pages: Everything is working
  • Broken pages: These have errors
  • Have issues: Some small problems
  • Redirects: These lead to other pages
  • Blocked pages: These can’t be crawled

Click on the “Crawled Pages” tab to see all your pages. Then click the number in the “Issues” column to find out what’s wrong and what to fix. Not sure what something means? Click “Why and how to fix it” to get help.

Check Your XML Sitemap

A sitemap helps search engines find all your pages. Use Google Search Console to check if your XML sitemap was submitted and read properly.

Check Your Page Speed

A page speed check shows what’s slowing down your site and how to fix it. When your site loads fast, visitors stay longer and are more likely to take action.

For example, Agrofy, a farm supply website, fixed their speed issues. After that, fewer people left their shopping carts before finishing a purchase, the drop rate went down by 76%.

Measure Your Page’s Speed

Use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to check your speed. It gives helpful data and tips to improve performance.

Here are a few things the tool checks:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This shows how fast your main content loads. Try to keep it under 2.5 seconds.
  • To improve LCP: make big images or animations smaller.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This checks how fast your site reacts when people click or type.
  • Keep it under 200 milliseconds by reducing the size of JavaScript and removing extra scripts.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This tracks how stable your page looks as it loads. If ads or images move things around, your CLS score will be worse.

Focus on Fixes That Matter Most

When working on your page speed, start with changes that make the biggest difference, like:

• Making images smaller and faster to load
• Cleaning up extra code or scripts
• Joining and shrinking CSS and JavaScript files

Step #3: Look at Your Backlink Profile

Doing a backlink check helps us understand who is linking to our website and how it’s helping us. Good links from trusted websites can help us rank better on search engines. But bad links or not having enough links can make it harder to improve rankings.

Check the Backlinks We Have

Start by using a tool like Semrush’s Backlink Analytics to see an overview of our backlinks. Look at the total number of links, how many different websites are linking to us, and the health score of those links.

Check the Quality of the Links

Next, use the Backlink Audit tool to see how healthy our links are. The tool will show links in three colors:

• Red means the link might be harmful (toxic)
• Orange means the link could be risky
• Green means the link is safe

Looking at these links helps in two ways:

• We can learn from the good links and try to get more like them
• We can find the bad links and ask to remove them

A few bad links are normal, especially as our website grows. What matters is that most of our links are good ones from trusted sites.

Keep an Eye on Our Links

It’s a good idea to check our backlink profile every month. This helps catch any bad links early before they hurt our rankings.

Step #4: Review Our Website Content

Checking our content can show us which pages are doing well and which ones need changes. It helps us decide which pages to:

• Keep as they are
• Update for better results
• Remove or combine with other pages

Check How Good the Content Is

Good content is content that readers find useful and search engines see as helpful. It should:

• Be based on facts
• Be current and not outdated
• Share something new or different

It’s also important that the content is:

• Easy to understand
• Well-organized
• Broken into short paragraphs
• Has pictures, charts, or videos when needed

Review Titles and Meta Descriptions

Titles and meta descriptions are the first things people see in search results. They help people decide whether to click our link.
Good titles should:

• Include the main keyword at the start
• Be short (under 60 characters)
• Use interesting words that grab attention
• Have the same style across our site

Good meta descriptions should:

• Use important keywords in a natural way
• Match what the page is about
• Be short (under 155 characters)
• Invite people to take action, like “Learn more” or “Shop now”

Use Google Search Console to find pages that show up in searches but don’t get many clicks. These are good pages to improve by updating their title or descriptions.

Step #5: Check the User Experience

When we check the user experience (UX) of our site, we look for anything that makes it hard for users to find what they need. Fixing these problems helps people stay on our site longer and take action, like buying something or signing up.

A good user experience also tells search engines that our site is helpful, which can improve our rankings. Page experience is an important part of SEO.

Here’s how we can check our site’s UX:

Check the Mobile Experience

Since over 60% of people use their phones to browse the internet, we need to make sure our site works well on all screen sizes.

Look for things like:

• Are the buttons and links big enough to tap easily?
• Do the images resize properly on different screens?
• Is the text easy to read without zooming in?
• Does the menu work smoothly on a mobile device?

Check Visual Layout and Readability

The design of our site should help guide people’s eyes to the important parts and make everything easy to read.
Focus on:

• Are the headers organized clearly (H1, H2, H3) with different sizes to show importance?
• Is the text easy to read against the background color?
• Is there enough white space to make the page look clean and not crowded?

Test the Calls to Action (CTAs)

Calls to action are very important because they get people to do something. We need to make sure they are easy to see, clear, and easy to click.

Check if the CTAs:

• Stand out on the page
• Use action words like “Shop Now” or “Get Started”
• Show up at the right places on the page
• Work well on phones and computers

We can also use tools to see:

• Where users click the most (hot spots)
• How far they scroll down the page
• If they notice the CTAs or scroll past them
• If placing CTAs in different spots works better

Step #6: Check Analytics and Conversions

Checking the website is only part of the job. We also need to look at the data to understand what to do next.

Analyze Search Results

Open Google Search Console to check how our pages are doing. Look for:

• Pages with no traffic
• Content that doesn’t get many clicks
• Pages stuck on page 2 or 3 of search results

Check Website Traffic

After cleaning up old or bad content, check how the other pages are doing. Brian Dean says traffic is the most important thing to watch because it shows if people are visiting our pages.

Look for pages where traffic is dropping. Here’s how:

• Open the “Performance” tab in Google Search Console
• Scroll down and open the “Pages” tab
• Set the date range to 12 months or more
• Pick a page and look at its traffic graph

Watch out for:

• Pages with a steady drop over several months
• Pages with sudden drops that haven’t bounced back
• Pages that used to do well but have lost visitors

These pages might need updates to bring the traffic back.

Take Action After the Website Audit

After doing the audit, we will likely have a long list of things to fix.
But how do we know where to start? And how do we use our time wisely?

Here’s how:

Prioritize the Fixes:

Start with the problems that affect SEO and user experience the most, like:

• Major technical problems like pages not getting found by Google
• Missing titles or descriptions on important pages
• Slow-loading pages
• Menus that are confusing
• Bad experience on mobile
• Lots of toxic backlinks

Make an Action Plan

Seeing a big list of issues can feel overwhelming. To make it easier, break the list into smaller groups based on how fast we can fix each one.

For example:

• Quick wins that can be fixed right away
• Bigger projects that need more time

This way, we can start improving things quickly without feeling stressed.

Ready to Do a Website Audit?

When we start our first audit, it’s better to keep it simple. Focus on the parts of the site where we have the biggest problems.

For example:

• If our rankings are dropping, focus on an on-page SEO audit.
• If people leave our site quickly, focus on a UX audit.

Before, during, and after the audit, we can follow a full SEO checklist to stay on track and make sure we cover everything important.