Website Audit Checklist: What to Review Before You Rebuild

A rebuild is expensive and it throws away everything currently working — including whatever search rankings, backlinks, and muscle memory your existing site has built up. Before committing to one, it's worth finding out exactly what's actually broken. That's what an audit is for. Here's what to check, organized into the six areas that actually matter.

1. Conversion

The site can look great and still not turn visitors into leads or sales. Check:

• Is there one clear, obvious next step on every page — not three competing buttons?
• How many fields does your lead form ask for? Every extra field is a reason to abandon it.
• Is the actual offer clear — what do you get, and what does it cost or require?
• Does the path from "landed on homepage" to "submitted a form" take more than 2–3 clicks?

2. SEO

Traffic is worthless if the site can't be found. Check:

• Does every page have a unique title tag and meta description, or are they duplicated/missing?
• Is there a logical heading structure (one H1, sensible H2s), or is it just a wall of styled text?
• Do important pages link to each other, or are they orphaned with no internal links pointing to them?
• Is there an XML sitemap, and does robots.txt actually allow the pages you want indexed?
• Are there obvious content gaps — questions your customers ask that the site doesn't answer anywhere?

3. UX

Check:

• Can someone find what they need from the navigation without searching?
• Does it actually work well on a phone, or is it a shrunk-down desktop layout?
• Is the most important information above the fold, or buried below three scrolls of filler?
• Are there dead ends — pages with no clear next step or way back?

4. Trust

Check:

• Is there real proof — actual reviews, real case studies, verifiable claims — or placeholder-looking content?
• Can a visitor easily find who they're dealing with — a real name, real contact information, a real address if relevant?
• Are any claims made (results, credentials, guarantees) actually backed up, or just asserted?

5. Performance

Check:

• Does the homepage load noticeably slowly, especially on mobile?
• Are images unnecessarily large — multi-megabyte photos serving as small thumbnails?
• Are there scripts loading (chat widgets, trackers, old plugins) that aren't actually being used anymore?

6. Messaging

Check:

• Does the homepage say what the business actually does within the first few seconds, or does it lead with vague language?
• Is the copy written around what the customer gets, or around internal jargon and technology?
• Is there anything that differentiates this business from a competitor, stated explicitly — not implied?

What to do with the findings

Not everything on this list is worth fixing immediately. Sort findings into three tiers: Fix Now (actively costing you leads or sales), Fix Next (real gaps worth planning for), and Improve Later (polish, not blockers). Working through the list in that order gets the highest-impact problems solved first instead of getting lost in low-value polish.

If you'd rather have someone else run through all six categories and hand you a prioritized, written report instead of doing it yourself, that's exactly what AgoraTide's $299 Website Audit is built to do.