How to Audit Your Website Using Only Free Tools

# How to Audit Your Website Using Only Free Tools

If you run a small business, you've probably been told your website needs an "audit." Maybe a freelancer quoted $800 for one. Maybe a SaaS tool offered a $99/month plan. Maybe you just closed the tab.

Here's the honest version: you can audit almost everything that matters on a small business site using free tools, in an afternoon. You won't catch every edge case a senior consultant would, but you'll find the issues that actually lose you customers — slow pages, broken contact forms, pages Google can't find, content that doesn't match what people search for.

This guide is the workflow, in order, with free tools only. No upsells.

What an audit actually means

A website audit is a structured check of four things:

1. Can people find your site? (search visibility)
2. Does it work? (speed, mobile, broken links)
3. Does it answer what visitors came for? (content quality)
4. Does it convert? (the path from visit to phone call, form fill, or sale)

That's the whole job. Anyone who makes it sound more complicated is selling you something.

The free toolkit

Everything below is free. Most you can use without an account.

• Google Search Console — how Google sees your site
• Google PageSpeed Insights — speed and Core Web Vitals
• Google's Mobile-Friendly Test — phone usability check
• Google Analytics (GA4) — what visitors actually do (optional but helpful)
• Bing Webmaster Tools — same idea as Search Console, for Bing
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider — the free version crawls up to 500 URLs, plenty for most small business sites
• Your own phone — the most underrated audit tool there is

Skip everything else for now. You don't need premium SEO software to find your top ten problems.

Step 1: See your site the way Google sees it

Start with Google Search Console. If you've never set it up, do it now — verification takes about ten minutes via a DNS record or meta tag.

Once inside, look at three reports:

Pages → Indexing. This tells you which pages Google has added to its index. If you have 40 pages and only 12 are indexed, you have a problem. Click into the "Not indexed" reasons. The common ones:

• Discovered – currently not indexed — Google knows about it but hasn't crawled it, usually because the page looks low value or duplicates another page.
• Crawled – currently not indexed — Google looked and decided not to include it. Improve the page or remove it.
• Page with redirect — usually fine; just confirm the redirects go somewhere sensible.
• Not found (404) — a page that used to exist. If anything still links to it, redirect to the closest replacement.

Performance. Sort queries by high impressions and low clicks. These are searches where you show up but nobody clicks — almost always a weak title or meta description. Rewrite them.

Core Web Vitals. Pages are flagged "Poor," "Needs Improvement," or "Good" on mobile and desktop. Take any "Poor" URL into PageSpeed Insights next.

Step 2: Check speed honestly

Open PageSpeed Insights and run your homepage and your top three landing pages — the ones people actually arrive on from Google.

Look at the mobile score, not desktop. Most of your visitors are on phones, and mobile is what Google ranks on. A mobile score in the 80s is good. The 60s is okay. Below 50 is hurting you.

The three Core Web Vitals worth knowing, per Google's own guidance:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how long until the biggest element on the page loads. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how fast your page responds when someone taps. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much the page jumps around as it loads. Aim for under 0.1.

If you want the official definitions and thresholds, web.dev's Vitals guide is the source.

The fixes you'll need most often:

• Oversized images. A 4MB hero JPEG is almost always the LCP problem. Compress under 200KB and serve in WebP.
• Render-blocking JavaScript. Themes and page builders load far more scripts than they need. A free caching plugin handles most of this on WordPress.
• Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, heatmap tools, Facebook pixels — each one adds weight. Audit what you actually use.

Step 3: Crawl your own site

Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider (the free tier covers up to 500 URLs). Enter your domain and let it run.

When it finishes, check:

• Response Codes. Filter for 4xx. Any 404 still linked from your own site needs to be fixed or redirected — see our guide on fixing broken links.
• Page Titles. Sort by length. Anything over 60 characters gets truncated in Google. Anything missing entirely is a big miss.
• Meta Description. Aim for 150–160 characters. Don't leave any blank.
• H1. Every page should have exactly one. Zero is bad; two is worse.
• Images. Filter for missing alt text. Five-minute fix per page; helps accessibility and SEO.

A real example: a local plumbing company ran this and found 23 pages with the same title tag — all "Home | Smith Plumbing." Twenty minutes of rewriting gave each page a specific title like "Emergency Plumbing in Cedar Rapids" and "Water Heater Repair." Within six weeks, three of those pages landed on page one for their target searches.

Step 4: Test mobile in real life

The Mobile-Friendly Test gives you a yes/no answer. Useful, but limited. The better audit is on your actual phone — not your laptop's mobile view.

Try to do what a customer would:

• Find your phone number. Can you tap to call?
• Find your address. Does it open in Maps?
• Fill out the contact form with one thumb.
• Read a blog post without pinching to zoom.
• Look at a product image. Does it load before you scroll past it?

You'll find issues no tool flags — buttons too close together, forms that don't auto-fill, CTAs hidden behind overlays, pop-ups that won't close. This is the step most owners skip, and it's where the highest-impact fixes usually live.

Step 5: Audit your content honestly

Google has been public for years that "helpful, reliable, people-first content" is what they reward. The official guidance is worth reading in full (linked in Sources). For a small business, the questions that matter most:

• Does this page answer the question a visitor came with? If someone searched "best lunch spot in Portland," your About page doesn't answer that.
• Is it written by someone who actually knows the work? Generic copy that could appear on any plumber's site doesn't rank anymore. Specifics about your town, your work, your customers do.
• Does it match search intent? "How much does a roof replacement cost" wants a number range, not a sales pitch.

Walk through your top five pages and ask, as a real customer, would I get what I came for? If no — that's your content audit. Small business owners often find their best instincts here are sharper than any tool's; if it feels thin, it is.

Step 6: Check your structured data

If your site has reviews, events, products, recipes, or articles, structured data helps Google understand the page and sometimes display it as a rich result. Google publishes specs for each type (Article schema is linked in Sources), and the Rich Results Test will tell you exactly what schema a URL has and whether it validates.

For a small business site, the high-value types are:

• LocalBusiness — hours, phone, address, service area
• Review / AggregateRating — only if you have legitimate customer reviews
• FAQ — for any page with real questions and answers
• Article — for blog posts

You don't need to hand-write JSON-LD. Most CMS platforms have a free plugin that handles it. Just verify the output in the Rich Results Test.

Step 7: Look at the conversion path

This step has nothing to do with SEO and everything to do with whether your site makes money.

Open Google Analytics (or whatever you use). Find your top five landing pages — the ones people enter on from search. For each, ask:

• What action do I want someone to take here?
• Is that action obvious within three seconds of landing?
• How many clicks does it take to complete?

A flooring company ran this audit and realized its "Request Quote" button sat below the fold on mobile, behind a hero carousel. Moving it to a sticky bottom-of-screen button doubled their form submissions within a month. No tool would have caught that. They found it by being honest about how their own site actually worked on a phone.

A complete free audit checklist

Print this. Work through it once — 3 to 4 hours the first time.

• [ ] Search Console set up and verified
• [ ] All important pages indexed
• [ ] Mobile Core Web Vitals are "Good" or "Needs Improvement" — not "Poor"
• [ ] PageSpeed mobile score above 60 for top pages
• [ ] Zero broken internal links
• [ ] Every page has a unique title tag, 50–60 characters
• [ ] Every page has a meta description, 150–160 characters
• [ ] Every page has exactly one H1
• [ ] Every image has alt text
• [ ] Tested on your actual phone, doing real customer actions
• [ ] Tap-to-call and tap-for-directions work
• [ ] Contact form submitted successfully
• [ ] Structured data validates in Rich Results Test
• [ ] Top 5 pages clearly answer their target search query
• [ ] Primary CTA visible within 3 seconds of landing

What free tools won't catch

To be straight with you: a free audit done well covers about 80% of what matters for a small business site. The remaining 20% is things like competitive backlink analysis, log-file analysis for crawl budget, large-scale content gap research, and granular Core Web Vitals field data for low-traffic pages.

For most small businesses, those can wait. Fix the obvious things first. Revisit in six months.

When to automate this

Once you've done the manual audit and fixed the big stuff, you'll want to keep an eye on it. Doing this every quarter by hand is fine for a five-page site. For anything larger — or when you'd rather see one report than juggle seven tools — that's where automated audits earn their keep.

Run a free website audit with FreeSiteAudit to get a single report covering speed, SEO, mobile, accessibility, and structured data, with fixes ranked by impact. No credit card. It pulls from the same sources you'd check manually, then prioritizes the issues so you know what to fix first.

Even if you never use a tool like ours, the workflow above is the one that works. Free, repeatable, and honest about what actually matters.

Sources

• Google Search Central, "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content": https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
• Google Search Central, "Article structured data": https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/article
• web.dev, "Web Vitals": https://web.dev/articles/vitals