Website Audit Checklist for UK Small Businesses

Start with the pages that matter

List your homepage, main service or product page and contact or checkout page. Record what a visitor should do on each one. For a local business, include location and contact information; for a web app, concentrate on the public landing page and the route into the product.

Run a free website audit for an initial diagnosis. Growth Audit checks the submitted page and a bounded sample of discovered pages when crawling is enabled. It is not an exhaustive crawl of a large website or an inspection of private dashboards.

Check search visibility and page structure

• Give each important page a descriptive title, a useful description and a clear main heading.
• Check that pages you want found are not blocked by robots.txt or marked noindex.
• Keep canonical URLs, internal links and sitemap URLs consistent.
• Link important services and guides from visible navigation or relevant content.
• Check whether structured data reflects information actually shown on the page.

These checks identify technical and content signals. An automated score cannot establish a Google position, search demand or whether Google has indexed a URL. Use Search Console for that evidence and see the website SEO guide for next steps.

Test speed and mobile usability

Open the key pages on a phone. Look for horizontal scrolling, clipped buttons and important text hidden by overlays. Check how quickly the main content becomes usable.

Where PageSpeed data is available, distinguish controlled lab measurements from field data based on real visitors. Field data may be unavailable for a low-traffic page. A single test is a snapshot, not proof that every visitor gets the same speed. Read the Core Web Vitals guide.

Review accessibility and the enquiry journey

Navigate with the keyboard. Confirm visible focus, usable menus, labelled forms and readable text. Try the contact journey and error states with safe test inputs. An automated scan can flag some accessibility problems; manual testing is needed and a passing score is not a compliance certificate.

Check that contact details and the next action are obvious. State what happens after an enquiry and avoid making users guess which service is available. Read why websites do not get leads when visits are not turning into enquiries.

Check local-business information

Verify your business name, address where appropriate, phone number, service area and opening hours. Compare your website with your actual Google Business Profile. Website signals alone do not confirm profile ownership, map ranking or consistency across every directory.

Read the Google Business Profile tips and choose a relevant industry audit. Web apps without a local-business presence should not be judged against physical-location requirements.

Turn findings into a manageable plan

For each issue, record the affected URL, evidence, customer impact, owner and acceptance check. Prioritise a broken enquiry path, inaccessible content or indexing problem before minor cosmetic changes. Resolve dependencies before estimating delivery dates.

After changing the site, repeat the relevant test and compare the same pages and conditions. Measure enquiries with your own analytics and business records. A better audit score is useful evidence of technical improvement, but it does not guarantee extra traffic or revenue.

Check your website health or compare audit tools before starting the next review.