Website Audit Checklist: 50 Things to Check Before You Pitch a Client

Before you pitch a potential client on a website redesign, you need ammunition. Not opinions — data. A thorough website audit gives you specific, measurable problems to reference in your outreach.

This is the exact checklist we use at Webfire to audit websites automatically. You can run through it manually, or let Webfire do it in seconds. Either way, these are the 50+ things that separate a professional audit from guesswork.

Performance (The Big One)

Performance is where most local business websites fall apart. If a site is slow, nothing else matters — visitors leave before they see anything.

Core Web Vitals

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — How long until the main content loads. Under 2.5s is good. Over 4s is poor.
2. First Contentful Paint (FCP) — How long until anything appears on screen. Under 1.8s is good.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — Does the page jump around while loading? Under 0.1 is good.
4. Total Blocking Time (TBT) — How long is the page frozen and unresponsive? Under 200ms is good.
5. Speed Index — How quickly content is visually populated. Under 3.4s is good.

Performance Scores

6. Overall Performance Score — Google Lighthouse score out of 100. Under 50 is a serious problem.
7. Mobile Performance Score — Often much worse than desktop. This is what matters most.
8. Page Size — Is the page bloated? Over 3MB is a red flag.
9. Total HTTP Requests — How many files does the browser need to download? Over 80 is excessive.

Security

Security issues are scary for business owners, which makes them powerful talking points in a pitch.

10. SSL Certificate — Does the site have HTTPS? If not, Chrome literally shows "Not Secure" to every visitor.
11. SSL Expiry Date — Is the certificate about to expire? Expired SSL = site goes down or shows warnings.
12. HTTPS Redirect — Does the HTTP version redirect to HTTPS? Many sites have SSL but don't force the redirect.

HTML & On-Page Fundamentals

These are the building blocks of how a website communicates with search engines and social media.

Title & Meta

13. Has Title Tag — Does the page have a <title> tag at all?
14. Title Length — Is it between 30-60 characters? Too short wastes space. Too long gets truncated in search results.
15. Title Content — Is it descriptive or is it just "Home" or the domain name?
16. Has Meta Description — Does the page tell Google what it's about?
17. Meta Description Length — Is it between 120-160 characters?

Headings

18. Has H1 Tag — Every page needs exactly one H1.
19. H1 Content — Is it descriptive and keyword-rich, or is it "Welcome to our website"?
20. H1 Count — Multiple H1s are a structural problem.
21. Structured Headings — Are H2s, H3s, etc. used in logical order, or is it a mess?

Technical HTML

22. Has Canonical URL — Does the page tell search engines which URL is the "official" version?
23. Has Open Graph Tags — Do links look good when shared on Facebook/LinkedIn?
24. Has Twitter Card — Same thing but for Twitter/X.

SEO Technical

This is where you find the problems that keep sites from ranking in Google.

25. Has robots.txt — Is the site telling search engines what to crawl?
26. Has Sitemap — Is there an XML sitemap? Does it work?
27. Sitemap URL — Is it properly referenced in robots.txt?
28. Has Schema Markup — Structured data (JSON-LD) that helps Google understand the business. Local businesses should have LocalBusiness schema at minimum.
29. Schema Types — What types of schema are present? (Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, etc.)
30. Has Hreflang — Only relevant for multi-language sites, but good to check.

SEO Content

Content issues are easy to spot and easy to explain to non-technical business owners.

31. Image Count — How many images are on the page?
32. Images Missing Alt Text — Alt text is required for accessibility and helps with SEO. Missing alt text on most images is common.
33. Internal Link Count — Does the site link to its own pages? Good internal linking helps Google crawl everything.
34. External Link Count — Does the site link out to other sites? Some is fine, excessive is not.
35. Broken Links — Any links that lead to 404 pages? This hurts SEO and user experience.
36. Word Count — Is there enough content on the page? Under 300 words is thin content.
37. Duplicate Title — Is the same title used across multiple pages? Google hates this.

Analytics & Tracking

If a business isn't tracking their website visitors, they have no idea what's working.

38. Has Google Analytics — Is GA4 installed?
39. Analytics Type — GA4, Universal Analytics (deprecated), or something else?
40. Has Facebook Pixel — Are they running Facebook ads? If yes, is the pixel installed?
41. Has Hotjar — Are they using heatmaps or session recordings?
42. Other Tracking Scripts — Any other analytics or marketing tools?

Technology Stack

Understanding what a site is built on tells you a lot about the redesign effort.

43. CMS Detected — WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, custom, etc.
44. Framework Detected — React, Next.js, jQuery (red flag for age), etc.
45. Server Technology — What's serving the site? nginx, Apache, Cloudflare, etc.

AI Readiness (The New Frontier)

This is a newer category but increasingly important as AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) grows.

46. Has llms.txt — A file that tells AI crawlers what content to index. Very few sites have this today.
47. Has llms-full.txt — Extended version with more detailed content for AI.
48. AI Readiness Score — Overall score of how prepared the site is for AI-powered search.

Miscellaneous

49. HTTP Status Code — Is the site actually returning 200 OK, or is it throwing errors?
50. Redirect Chain — Does the URL go through multiple redirects before landing? Each redirect adds load time.

How to Use This Checklist

There are two ways to approach this:

The Manual Way

Visit the website. Open Chrome DevTools. Run Lighthouse. Check robots.txt and sitemap manually. Look at the source code. Test on mobile. Check SSL. Look for analytics scripts.

Time per site: 15-20 minutes for a thorough audit.

The Automated Way

Use Webfire to scan any niche in any city. Every website gets audited automatically against this entire checklist. You get scores, grades, and specific problems — ready to use in your outreach.

Time per site: About 10 seconds.

If you're auditing one site for a specific prospect, the manual approach works fine. If you're building a pipeline of leads, automation is the only way to scale.

Turning Audit Results Into Pitches

The audit is step one. Here's how to turn those results into paying clients:

1. Lead with the scariest problem. "Your site doesn't have SSL" or "Your site takes 7 seconds to load" gets attention.
2. Quantify the impact. "53% of visitors leave if a site takes over 3 seconds to load" is more powerful than "your site is slow."
3. Offer a free walkthrough. Don't dump all 50 findings in an email. Share 2-3 problems and offer to walk them through the rest on a call.
4. Position the fix, not the features. Business owners don't care about "responsive design" or "semantic HTML." They care about "more customers finding you online" and "not losing visitors to a slow site."

The Bottom Line

A website audit isn't just a technical exercise — it's a sales tool. When you can show a business owner exactly what's wrong with their website, backed by real data, you're not selling them on a redesign. You're showing them a problem they didn't know they had and offering to fix it.

That's a completely different conversation than "Hi, I build websites."

Whether you use this checklist manually or let Webfire handle it, the key is to audit first, pitch second. Lead with data, not opinions. And always remember: the best clients are the ones who can see exactly why they need your help.