A website audit checklist for agencies

A website audit checklist survives fine inside one person's head, right up until a second person joins the team and starts making their own calls about what counts as slow, what counts as unmaintained, and what is worth flagging to a prospect at all. A website audit checklist for agencies has to solve a different problem to the one a solo freelancer needs solved: not what to check, but how to make sure two different people checking two different sites end up with two audits that actually agree with each other.

Why a mental checklist doesn't survive a second team member

Most freelancers who audit sites for a living do carry a checklist, they just never write it down. It lives as instinct: load the site on a phone, glance for the SSL padlock, poke the contact form, form an opinion about how dated it looks. That works fine when one person does every audit and slowly builds a consistent feel for what “slow” or “dated” means across dozens of sites. It stops working the moment a second person joins, because their instinct was built on a different set of sites, and their idea of a slow load time or a workable mobile layout will not match yours exactly. Two audits of two similar businesses can end up reading like two different products, which looks poor if a prospect or client ever happens to see both.

What actually belongs on the list

The checks worth putting in writing are the ones that do not depend on taste. Does the site load in a reasonable time on a phone over an ordinary mobile connection, not a laptop on office wifi. Is there a valid SSL certificate, or does a visitor get a browser warning before the page even loads. What is the site actually built on: a proper platform someone can maintain, an abandoned page-builder trial, or nothing beyond a template nobody has touched since it went live. Does the business show up as active and correctly registered, address and status matching what is on file at Companies House, rather than a dissolved company still running an old page. And, sometimes the most important line on the sheet, does a website exist at all, or is the business trading entirely through an Instagram page and a Google listing with no site behind it. Anything that can be answered with a fact belongs on the checklist. Anything that needs a judgement call, like whether the design feels old, belongs somewhere else.

Write it down once, not in everyone's head

The fix is mechanical rather than clever: turn the mental list into an actual shared document, spreadsheet or template, with the same fields in the same order for every audit, filled in by whoever is doing the work that day. It should be dull to fill in. Load time in seconds, not “feels slow”. SSL present or not, not “looks insecure”. Contact form works or does not, checked by actually submitting it, in the same spirit as the dead links and broken forms worth catching that are covered in dead booking links and broken forms. A written checklist like this also survives someone leaving. A freelancer's private mental model walks out the door with them; a shared document does not.

Keep the judgement calls, but keep them separate

None of this means opinion has no place in an agency's audits. Whether a design looks dated, whether the copy reads well, whether a layout is confusing rather than merely unusual, these are all real and worth including in a report. The point is not to remove judgement from the process, it is to stop judgement from doing the job a fact should be doing. A checklist that mixes “SSL missing” with “looks a bit tired” on the same line trains the whole team to treat both as equally solid, and a prospect who checks one of those claims themselves and finds the other one softer will trust the rest of the report less. Keep the objective section short, consistent and boring, and let the editorial commentary live in its own space, clearly labelled as an opinion rather than a finding.

Turning a consistent audit into something a prospect can see

Once the checks themselves are consistent, the output is worth turning into something a prospect can actually look at rather than take on trust, which is the approach covered in why a website scorecard for prospects beats a pitch. A shared checklist makes this easier across a team specifically because every audit is structured the same way before it becomes a report: whoever wrote it up, the prospect is reading the same categories, in the same order, backed by the same kind of evidence. That consistency is part of what makes the report feel credible rather than like a sales pitch dressed up as research.

Running every one of these checks by hand, on every result in a search, and keeping them consistent across more than one person, is the part that is genuinely slow to do well. Patchscout runs the same audit against every business a search turns up: page speed, SSL, the platform detected, mobile behaviour and whether Companies House shows the business still trading, and it scores each one the same way regardless of who on the team is looking at the result. Everyone sees the same checks against the same evidence, which is close to impossible to promise when the checklist only exists in people's heads. The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to see what a consistent audit looks like run across a full trade in one town.