Marketing Audit Tools

Free Website Site Audit: What to Check, What Tools to Use, and What to Do After

15+ years in local marketing; Google Ads certified; Shopify Partner.

You've got a website. You're spending money to send people to it. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you're not totally sure it's working.

That's the right instinct. A site audit is how you find out.

This isn't a guide about Facebook ads or Google Ads campaign structure , if that's what you need, the complete ads audit guide covers that territory well. This article is specifically about your website: what's broken, what's slow, what Google can't read, and what's probably costing you leads right now without you knowing it.

What a Site Audit Actually Tells You (and What It Doesn't)

A site audit is a structured review of your website's technical health, content quality, and visibility in search. Think of it as a physical for your site. You're not redesigning anything yet. You're just figuring out what's actually wrong before you spend money fixing the wrong things.

Here's the thing: most business owners I talk to have never done one. They built a site, paid someone to run ads to it, and assumed the site was fine. Sometimes it is. Often it's not.

A site audit will tell you:

Whether Google can properly read and index your pages
How fast your site loads on mobile (and whether it's slow enough to be actively hurting you)
Whether your pages are targeting the right search terms
If you have broken links, missing metadata, or duplicate content issues
How your local search presence looks, if that matters for your business

What it won't tell you: whether your offer is compelling, whether your pricing is right, or whether your sales process is broken. A site audit finds technical and structural problems. If the site is technically fine but still not converting, that's a different conversation.

The Free Website Audit Tools Worth Using (and the Ones That Waste Your Time)

There are a lot of free website audit tools out there. Most of them are lead magnets. You enter your URL, get a scary-looking score out of 100, and then get a sales email. That's the model.

A few are actually useful.

Google Search Console is the best free site audit tool you're not using. It's free, it's direct from Google, and it shows you exactly which pages are indexed, which have errors, and what search queries are driving traffic. If you haven't connected it to your site yet, that's step one.

PageSpeed Insights (also free, also from Google) runs a real-world performance test on any URL. It uses Core Web Vitals, which are the actual speed and usability signals Google uses to rank pages. A score under 50 on mobile is a real problem. I've audited sites for Canadian SMBs where the mobile score was in the 20s and the owner had no idea.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you a free site audit for your own domain. It's not the full paid product, but it crawls your site, flags broken links, missing title tags, and pages with thin content. It's the closest thing to a real technical audit you'll get for free. Per DataForSEO's Canadian keyword data, the term "site audit tool" carries a CPC of CA$27.90 , meaning paid tools are bidding hard for that traffic. The free Ahrefs option is genuinely competitive.

HubSpot Website Grader is quick and gives a readable report. It's decent for a first pass. Don't make major decisions based on it alone.

What to avoid: any tool that asks for your phone number before showing you results. That's not a tool. That's a sales funnel.

For a deeper look at tools specifically built for SEO analysis, the free SEO audit tools guide covers that angle in more detail. And if you're looking for ongoing SEO health monitoring rather than a one-time check, free SEO checker tools is worth reading next.

How to Actually Run a Site Audit (Week by Week)

This is the part most articles skip. They tell you what to look for but not how to actually do the work. Here's a realistic timeline for a small business owner doing this yourself, or handing it to someone on your team.

Week 1: Set up your tools and pull the baseline data.

Connect Google Search Console if it's not already live. Submit your sitemap. Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and your three most important landing pages (service pages, not blog posts). Screenshot the scores. Run the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools crawl and export the issues list.

Don't try to fix anything yet. Just collect the data.

Week 2: Triage the issues.

Not everything in an audit report is urgent. In my experience, most sites have 40-80 flagged issues, but only 8-12 of them actually matter for traffic and leads. Focus on:

Pages returning a 404 error (broken pages)
Missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
Pages that are "noindexed" accidentally (Google can't see them)
Mobile PageSpeed scores below 50
Core Web Vitals failures, specifically Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) , that's the main content loading time , above 4 seconds

Typically, when I audit a site for the first time, the biggest issue isn't what the owner expected. It's usually a combination of slow mobile speed and a handful of important pages that Google simply can't find.

Week 3: Fix the high-priority technical issues.

If you're on WordPress, most speed issues can be addressed with a caching plugin (WP Rocket is the one I'd point to) and image compression. If your site is on a slower shared host, that's a harder conversation. Missing meta descriptions can be added directly in your CMS. Broken 404s need to be redirected to the correct page.

If you're not technical, this is the week you hand the list to your developer with specific URLs and specific problems. Not "fix the site." Fix page X, which has a broken link to page Y.

Week 4: Document what you fixed and set a re-audit schedule.

Run PageSpeed again. Check Search Console for crawl errors. Compare to your Week 1 baseline. Then set a calendar reminder to run this same process every 90 days. Sites break over time. Plugins update and conflict. Pages get accidentally noindexed. A quarterly check catches problems before they compound.

The Local Search Piece Most Site Audits Miss

If your business serves a specific city or region, a standard site audit isn't enough. You also need to check your local search presence, and that's a separate layer most free website audit tools completely ignore.

Here's what that means practically:

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is essentially a second website that Google controls. If it has wrong hours, missing service categories, or no recent reviews, it drags down your local visibility even if your actual website is technically clean.

Run a quick manual check:

Search your business name in Google. Does the GBP panel show up? Is the information accurate?
Search "[your service] + [your city]" in an incognito browser. Where do you rank in the map pack?
Check that your Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) are identical on your website, your GBP, and any directory listings (Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc.). Inconsistencies confuse Google.

In my experience, Canadian SMBs in mid-size cities like Saskatoon, Regina, or Kelowna often have a technically decent website but a half-finished GBP. That's a missed opportunity, because the map pack is where a lot of local purchase intent actually lives.

For a fuller picture of how auditing fits into your overall marketing review process, the marketing audit guide covers the broader checklist beyond just your website.

When to DIY and When to Hire Someone

Here's my honest take. If your site is under two years old, built on a common platform (WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix), and you're reasonably comfortable with your CMS, you can probably run a solid site audit yourself using the tools above. Budget 4-6 hours across the month. The tools are free. The fixes are mostly straightforward.

If your site is older than four years, was built by someone you can't get hold of anymore, or is running on a custom platform you don't fully understand, you probably need a developer or an agency to run the audit. Not because the problems are more complex in theory, but because the fixes often require back-end access and someone who knows what they're looking at.

One worked example: say you're running Google Ads at CA$2,000/month (a common starting budget for Canadian SMBs in professional services, per DataForSEO's Canadian market data showing typical ad spend in this range). If your landing page has a mobile PageSpeed score of 28, you're likely converting at half the rate you could be. That's roughly CA$1,000/month in wasted ad spend attributable to a fixable technical problem. A one-time audit and fix that costs CA$500-800 pays for itself in the first month.

The math usually favours fixing the site before spending more on ads.

When to Escalate: Red Flags That Mean You Need More Than a Free Tool

A free site audit tool can flag problems. It can't always diagnose why they exist or what to do about them.

Watch for these:

Your Search Console shows "Crawl Anomalies" or "Server Errors" , this usually means a hosting or configuration problem that needs a developer.
Your site was penalised by Google , Search Console will show a "Manual Action" notice. This is serious and needs someone who knows what they're doing.
Your audit tool shows thousands of duplicate pages , often caused by URL parameters or faceted navigation on e-commerce sites. Not a quick fix.
Your Core Web Vitals are failing but you've already optimised images and added caching , the problem might be your hosting, your theme, or a poorly-coded plugin. Harder to fix without technical help.

If you're seeing any of those, the free tools have done their job. They found the edge of what you can solve yourself. From there, you need someone in the site.