How To Perform Your Own Website Audit: The Top 5 things to check

Your website might be costing you leads right now—here's how to spot the issues before your competitors do

Speed matters more than you think

Site speed isn’t a technical nice-to-have. It’s a revenue problem. Around 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load. That means if your site is slow, you could be losing half your visitors before they even see what you do.

Checking speed is simple. Run your site through tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Don’t get hung up on the score alone — look at the specific recommendations. You’ll usually see the same culprits: huge images, bloated scripts, and slow server response.

The upside is most of this is fixable without a rebuild. Start with the basics: compress and resize images, turn on browser caching, and consider a content delivery network if you’re serving visitors across Australia or overseas. Even shaving a second or two off load time can make a measurable difference to conversions and enquiries. Your website has to earn its place in the business. Speed is one of the fastest ways to start.

Your mobile experience could be quietly losing half your visitors

Here’s a blunt reality: for most Australian businesses, more than 60% of traffic now comes from mobile. If your mobile experience is clunky, you’re turning away most of your potential customers — often before they’ve read a single line.

You don’t need a lab to test this. Grab your phone and use your site like a customer would. Can you tap buttons without pinching and zooming? Does the text resize properly? Are forms easy to complete on a small screen? Try your main conversion action end-to-end — submit a contact form, request a quote, book a consult. If it’s frustrating for you, it’s worse for your visitors.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test will give you an official verdict, but don’t stop there. Check on different devices if you can — an iPhone, an Android, a tablet. Test on mobile data, not just office Wi‑Fi. The best mobile experiences feel straightforward and effortless. If yours doesn’t, it’s a sign mobile optimisation needs to move up your priority list.

Check whether Google can actually find your pages

You can have the strongest content in your space, but if Google can’t crawl and index it, it’s as good as invisible. We see this more often than you’d think in audits — key pages that are effectively hidden from search.

Start with Google Search Console. It’s free and tells you which pages are indexed and which are causing issues. Look for crawl errors, pages blocked in robots.txt, or important pages marked “noindex” by mistake. A quick sense check is to Google `site:yourwebsite.com.au`. If important pages don’t show up, you’ve just found a serious problem.

Common causes include broken internal links, weak internal linking structure, and technical settings that accidentally block search engines. Your XML sitemap should list all important pages and be submitted in Search Console. As a rule, any key page should be reachable within about three clicks from your homepage. If Google can’t crawl your site cleanly, your SEO is built on shaky ground. This is where technical SEO and your broader digital strategy meet — and it’s worth getting right.

Test whether your forms and calls-to-action actually work

It sounds basic, but it’s painful when you catch it late: you’re paying for traffic, and the main contact form has been broken for weeks. We’ve seen it happen. Forms break after a CMS update. Notifications get filtered into spam. Thank-you pages fail to load. The result is lost leads you never even knew existed.

Take ten minutes and walk through every key form on your site. Fill them in as if you were a customer. Use a personal email and check you receive confirmation emails promptly — and that they don’t land in junk. Make sure your team receives the lead notification. Test on desktop and mobile. Click every major CTA button and see where it lands. It’s dull, but it catches expensive problems.

Then look at how friendly those forms actually are. Are you asking for information you don’t need yet? Could you go from ten fields down to four and still qualify the lead properly? Is your main call-to-action clear and visible, or buried below a wall of text? Working forms are the minimum bar. You want forms people are willing to complete. Every extra field is another excuse to bail. Make it easy to get in touch and you’ll feel it in your pipeline.

Measure whether your content answers what people are really searching for

Well-written content isn’t enough if it doesn’t line up with what your audience is actually trying to find. A lot of businesses fall into the trap of writing what they want to say instead of what customers need to hear.

Start with your data. Look at which pages get traffic and which ones people bounce from quickly. A high bounce rate on a key page often means the content doesn’t match what visitors expected. In Google Search Console, review the search queries that are bringing people in. Are they the right topics? Do they match your services and goals?

Then compare that to what you hear on the ground. What questions come up again and again in sales calls? What lands in your support inbox? What are people asking in proposal meetings? Your job is to close that gap between real questions and what’s on the site.

Content that pulls its weight tends to do three things: it matches search intent, it gives genuinely useful answers, and it points people to a clear next step. If any one of those is missing, it’s a candidate for a rewrite. SEO here isn’t about stuffing in keywords. It’s about creating straightforward, useful content that answers the questions your future customers are already typing into Google.