Free website checker: what a full audit should actually cover
A complete audit spans indexability, accessibility, security, structured data, performance and AI visibility. Here is what each contributes, and the order worth fixing them in.
By Sapun Lamichhane · Arcetis
"Website audit" describes work ranging from a five-point checklist to a fortnight of consultancy. What follows is what a complete technical audit covers, what each area contributes, and — more usefully — the order worth working through it.
Indexability first, because nothing else matters otherwise
A page that cannot be indexed cannot benefit from any other improvement. Check for stray noindex directives, robots.txt disallows, canonical tags pointing somewhere unexpected, and pages with no internal links to them.
This is first because the failures are catastrophic and the fixes are usually one line. An audit that reports on heading structure for a page carrying a leftover staging noindex has buried the only finding that mattered.
Accessibility second
Highest-weighted findings in most scoring, a legal obligation in many jurisdictions, and the area with the largest gap between what automation catches and what actually blocks people. Fix the mechanical failures — contrast, alt attributes, labels, accessible names — then test with a keyboard and a screen reader.
Security third, because it is the fastest win
Security headers are typically the largest score movement available for the least work. Four of the five are a single line each and carry no risk. Content-Security-Policy is the exception and deserves a report-only deployment first.
Then SEO and structured data
- Unique titles and descriptions per page. Duplicates across templates are the most common serious finding.
- One h1 per page, headings in order.
- A self-referencing canonical on every indexable page.
- Organization and WebSite markup site-wide, BreadcrumbList below the root, and one accurate type per page template.
Then AI visibility
The area nothing else in a typical audit stack covers. Whether AI crawlers may reach you, whether your content is extractable once they do, and whether an agent could operate the page. All three fail silently — rankings are unaffected, so nothing signals the problem.
Performance last
Not because it is unimportant, but because it is the most effort per point and the most easily undone by the next deployment. Get the structural work stable first, then optimise.
What a report should give you
The test of an audit tool is whether you can act on it without trusting it. Every finding should name the rule that produced it, quote the evidence from your page, cite the standard behind it, and tell you what to change. A single blended score with no working shown is not auditable, and the correct response to one is scepticism.
What free means here
Our full website checker is free, with no account needed for your first scan and unlimited quick scans after. It runs every module in one pass and reports each category separately as well as together, because an average conceals the one failure you most needed to find.