How to check a website for problems
Most website problems are invisible from the owner’s chair because you never use your site the way a stranger does. This sweep finds what they experience.
Walk the golden path as a stranger
Open your site in a private browser window on your phone, not your desktop. Try to do the one thing a customer would: find a price, book, call, or buy. Note every point of friction - slow loads, tiny buttons, forms that fight you, popups that trap you. This ten-minute exercise finds problems no tool ranks highly enough.
Click every link in your navigation and footer
Broken links and 404s accumulate silently as pages get renamed and removed. Your navigation, footer, and any page that matters commercially should be checked link by link - or by a crawler that does it for you and reports every broken destination and redirect chain.
Measure speed with real data, not vibes
Your site feels fast to you because your browser has it cached. Core Web Vitals from Google PageSpeed Insights reflect what new visitors experience on average connections. Anything rated poor there is costing you visitors regardless of how it feels on your machine.
Check what search engines and AI can actually see
View your page source (right-click, View Page Source). If your actual content - headings, paragraphs, prices - is not in that raw HTML, most search crawlers and AI assistants cannot read it either. Sites built as JavaScript apps without prerendering are frequently invisible in ways their owners never suspect.
Look at trust signals the way a first-timer does
No privacy policy, no physical presence or ABN, no reviews, stock photos everywhere, a contact form with no email or phone - each is a reason a first-time visitor quietly leaves. These conversion killers never show up in technical tools, which is why audits that only check code miss them.
Then rank the findings by impact, not by count
A list of 60 issues is useless without priority. Fix in this order: anything blocking purchases or enquiries, then anything blocking search visibility, then speed, then polish. The AuditHQ report does this ranking automatically - every finding gets severity, evidence, and a recommended order across all nine areas it checks.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common website problem?
For small-business sites: slow, uncompressed images and missing basic search signals (titles, descriptions, indexability) are the most frequent technical findings, and weak trust signals are the most frequent conversion finding.
How often should I audit my website?
A full pass quarterly, plus after any redesign, replatform, or developer handover. Sites drift: plugins update, links break, certificates expire, and content goes stale without anyone deciding it should.
Can I audit a website for free?
Yes. The manual sweep above is free, and the AuditHQ free quick scan runs an automated sample across all nine audit areas in about 60 seconds with no signup - enough to see where the real problems concentrate before deciding on a full audit.