Website audit for small business: what it checks and what it should cost

What a website audit actually is

An audit is a test, not an opinion about your design. Someone goes through your site the way a visitor would, on a phone and on a laptop, and the way a search engine would, reading what the page sends behind the scenes. Then they write down what fails.

The output that matters is a list: what was found, why it matters, how to fix it and what the fix costs. If an audit doesn't tell you what to do on Monday, it's a report, not an audit.

The twelve things a website audit should check

1. The contact form delivers. Fill it in from a phone and confirm the message arrives. Forms break silently for months.
2. Mobile speed. How long the first screen takes on mobile data, and what is making it heavy.
3. Buttons go where they say. The WhatsApp button with the old number, the phone link that dials nothing.
4. Broken links, internal and external.
5. Files nobody should be able to download. A file with no link isn't private.
6. Security headers, the basic layers any scanner checks first.
7. Indexing signals. Pages accidentally marked noindex, a sitemap that lists the wrong pages, conflicting canonicals.
8. Structured data that tells Google and AI assistants who you are and what you sell.
9. What AI search can read. Whether crawlers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and others are allowed in.
10. Legal pages that tell the truth: a privacy policy that names the tools you actually use.
11. Accessibility basics, like links big enough for a finger and text you can read on a phone.
12. The path to a sale. Can a stranger tell what you sell, and how to buy it, from the first screen?

What a website audit should cost

Prices are all over the place because "audit" means different things. In WebFX's survey, 43% of businesses paid between $101 and $750 for an SEO audit, with small businesses ranging up to $2,500. Agency technical audits for large sites run much higher.

For a small business site of five to fifteen pages, a few hundred dollars buys a thorough audit. Mine is $150, delivered in three business days, and it's credited back if you hire me to fix what it finds.

The honest part: in my sample audit, most fixes cost less than the audit itself. Sometimes your site needs three fixes, not a new website, and a good auditor tells you that even when it means selling you less.

How to tell a real audit from a sales pitch

Before you pay for any website audit service, check four things:

• Free audits are usually sales. Someone has to pay for the time, and a free audit gets paid back by the redesign it recommends.
• A score is not a finding. "Your site scored 62" tells you nothing. "Your homepage image is 77% of the page weight" does.
• Every item has evidence. A screenshot, a header, a file path. If you can't check it yourself, you can't trust it.
• The fix comes with a price. Otherwise you can't decide what to do first.

What one looks like

I published a complete sample audit of a real twelve-page site that looked fine. It had twelve findings: one critical (internal files anyone could download), one high (returning visitors kept seeing the old design), four medium and six low. Each has the evidence, the fix and the cost.

Five checks you can do yourself today

1. Send yourself a message through your own contact form, from your phone.
2. Search site:yourdomain.com on Google and count the pages it shows.
3. Open your site on mobile data and count the seconds until you can read it.
4. Tap every button on your homepage.
5. Ask ChatGPT what your business does, and see if the answer is right.

If all five pass, you may not need to pay anyone. If one fails and you don't know why, that's what an audit is for.