Find out what is slowing your site down.

What the crawl looks at

An automated audit walks your site the way a search engine does and reports on the mechanical faults it finds. Broadly, four kinds of thing:

• Can it be reached. Pages that error, redirect in circles, or are blocked from being crawled at all. A page search engines can’t reach is a page that can’t rank, whatever is on it.
• Speed. How long pages take to become useful, and what is holding them up. Usually oversized images, too many scripts, or hosting that is the bottleneck.
• On-page basics. Missing or duplicated titles and descriptions, headings out of order, images with no alt text, links that go nowhere.
• Security and setup. Certificate problems, mixed content, and the configuration mistakes that quietly suppress a site for months.

What it can’t tell you

This is the part worth saying out loud, because a clean report can be reassuring in a misleading way.

A crawler checks whether your pages are built correctly. It has no opinion on whether they are about the right things. A site can score well and still be invisible because nobody searches for the words it uses, or because it never covers the questions its customers actually ask. That is a content and search problem, and no automated tool will raise it.

It also says nothing about whether the site persuades anyone. Fast, valid pages that don’t answer the visitor’s question convert about as well as slow ones.

How to read the result without panicking

Most first audits come back with a long list and an alarming-looking score. Very little of it is urgent.

1. Start with anything blocking access. Pages returning errors, redirect loops, or a rule stopping search engines from crawling. These are rare and they matter more than everything else combined.
2. Then duplicates. Two pages with the same title, or the same content on several URLs, make search engines pick one and it may not be the one you wanted.
3. Then speed, if it is genuinely bad. Shaving a tenth of a second off an already fast page is not where your time goes.
4. Ignore the score itself. It is a summary of counts, so one template problem repeated across two hundred pages reads as a catastrophe and is one fix.

That last point is the most common misreading. A large number of issues usually means a small number of causes.

What happens after you send it

Someone reads it, looks at your site, and replies. Not a template, and not a proposal for work you didn’t ask about.

The reply says what we found, which of it is worth acting on, and roughly what fixing it involves. Quite often the answer is that two or three specific things need doing and the rest can wait, and that is a perfectly good outcome for us to send you. If the honest answer is that your site is fine, we would rather say so than invent a project.

It helps if you tell us what prompted the question. “Enquiries dropped in June” points somewhere very different from “the site feels slow”, and knowing which one you are dealing with saves a round trip.

Common questions

Is the audit really free, and is there a catch?

It is free and there is no obligation. The instant crawl is run by a third-party tool, so entering your domain and email shares them with that provider. If you would rather not, send us the domain through the form instead and we will look at it directly.

Do I need to give you access to my site?

No. Everything described here is visible from outside. Access only comes up if you ask us to actually fix something, and even then it is access rather than ownership: the accounts stay in your name.

How often is an audit worth running?

Once or twice a year for most small sites, plus after anything structural: a redesign, a move to new hosting, or a change of address. Problems tend to arrive with changes rather than on a schedule. Sites on a care plan are checked as part of the monthly work, so there is nothing to remember.