Comprehensive Website Audit

What a comprehensive website audit covers

Most site problems are not isolated. A slow hero image is a performance problem, a conversion problem and — if it has no alt text — an accessibility problem. Auditing one discipline at a time hides those overlaps, which is why every W3Audit engagement runs all thirty-two checks across six categories on the same crawl of the same pages.

Each page in scope is fetched and evaluated against the checks below; three of the thirty-two — keyboard operability, screen-reader signal and analytics event firing — are validated with real browser automation that interacts with the live page. Findings are then reviewed by the auditor who signs the report, so what reaches you is a judgement about your site rather than a raw tool export.

• Technical & crawlability (7 checks) — robots.txt validity, indexability, sitemap accuracy, canonical tags, URL structure and depth, broken links and redirect chains, and honest error handling.
• Performance (6 checks) — Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP and CLS — plus image weight and format, third-party script cost, and a present, sane viewport meta tag.
• SEO & content (7 checks) — Unique titles and meta descriptions, heading order, structured data, Open Graph and Twitter markup, thin or duplicate content, and internal linking.
• UX & accessibility (6 checks) — Contrast against WCAG AA, alt text, form labels, keyboard operability, screen-reader behaviour on key journeys, and layout at 320px and 400% zoom.
• Conversion & analytics (2 checks) — Whether analytics is installed once and firing, and whether every conversion you care about is actually tracked against a defined event.
• Security (4 checks) — HTTPS enforced everywhere in one hop, certificate validity and chain, mixed content, and anything publicly exposed that should not be.

Read the detail by discipline

Every category has its own page explaining what is examined and how findings are worded:

How findings are ranked

Every finding carries a severity — critical, high, medium or low — and a category score from 0 to 100. Severity is a function of how much of the site is affected, whether the issue blocks access or indexing outright, and how much traffic or revenue sits behind the affected pages. The full weighting is documented on the methodology page; nothing in the score is a black box.

Alongside severity, each finding gets an effort estimate. That pairing is what makes the report usable: a critical issue that takes twenty minutes to fix belongs at the top of the list, above a critical issue that needs a template rebuild.

What you receive

A scored report with an overall health figure, six category scores, and every finding listed with the exact URLs and elements affected. Then a live one-hour session with the auditor, where the findings get explained, questioned and turned into an agreed order of work. Once your fixes ship, one re-audit is included so you can confirm the score moved and nothing regressed.

What is out of scope

The audit is diagnosis, not remediation — we identify and prioritise, your team implements, and we can quote implementation separately if you would rather we handled it. The security check is a configuration and exposure review, not penetration testing or malware scanning; that boundary is spelled out on the security audit page. Accessibility findings reference WCAG criteria but the report is not a legal conformance certificate.

Timeline and price

Most audits are crawled, reviewed and scored in 2–4 business days. The standard crawl covers the homepage and every page linked directly from it; wider or deeper coverage is a scoped add-on and adds to the timeline. The engagement is $2,500 flat, including the audit, the one-hour readout and the re-audit. Additional consulting time beyond the hour is $200 per hour or $1,500 per day.