A website audit: what I check before changing anything

3 September 2026 · 4 min

Almost no website is visibly broken. What actually happens is quieter: a page that takes three seconds to open on a phone, a price that only appears twelve screens down, a German version Google never indexed. The owner sees none of it — they see a good-looking site. They only see the result: the phone rings less than it should.

So I don’t start by changing things. I start by measuring. That’s what an audit is: separating what is genuinely costing money from what merely looks like it is.

Speed measured, not guessed

“The site is slow” isn’t a diagnosis. I measure three numbers, on a deliberately throttled phone over a slow connection, because that’s how most people visit you — not on a laptop wired to fibre.

How long until the main thing appears. Under 2.5 seconds is good.
How long the phone is locked up processing code before it responds to a tap.
How much the page jumps while loading. A button that shifts half a second later makes people tap the wrong thing.

Often the finding is that the site isn’t slow at all: it’s a 900 px photo served to a 390 px screen, or a chat widget nobody uses dragging 130 KB of code behind it. Swapping that is half an hour’s work. Rebuilding the site was never necessary.

The five languages, one at a time

This is the worst-handled part of Valais websites, and the one that costs most here. A button that swaps the text isn’t enough: if every version lives at the same address, Google sees a single page and picks one language. The others stop existing for anyone searching.

I check that each language has its own address, that each page tells Google which version is the original, and that it points correctly to its siblings. And I read the text. Machine-translated German shows — and with a customer in Visp or Brig, that costs the sale. Swiss High German never writes “ß”, it writes “ss”: a single “ß” tells the reader this wasn’t written by anyone local.

What Google sees, which isn’t what you see

I open the pages the way a search engine reads them. Titles repeated across pages, descriptions cut off mid-sentence, structured data missing or saying something different from the visible text, important pages with not one internal link. This is where the silent errors surface. I once found a description with two words welded together — “PR StudioStalden” — because the site generator was swallowing a space. Nobody had noticed, and it was the first thing anyone read on Google.

Accessibility: contrast with numbers, not opinions

This isn’t a matter of good intentions, it’s measurable. I calculate the real contrast between each piece of text and the background behind it. The recommended minimum is 4.5:1. Light grey text on a dark background almost always lands between 3:1 and 4:1 — readable to you, who already know what it says, hard work for a sixty-year-old customer in August sunshine. I also check whether the whole site can be used with a keyboard alone, and whether forms say what went wrong when something fails.

What got published by accident

The part nobody asks for and that tends to cause the most alarm. I look at what is genuinely reachable from the internet: internal files left in a public folder, working documents, contact lists, forgotten backups, access keys sitting in the page’s own code. In a recent audit I found a person’s complete CV reachable from a public repository. Nobody knew it was there.

What you get

A short list, ordered by return, with the problem, where it lives and what it costs to fix. No jargon and no thirty points to look thorough: if five things solve ninety per cent, it’s five things. And I tell you what isn’t worth touching — often the most useful part, because that’s what saves you money.

Want me to look at your site? I do the free assessment within 48 hours and tell you straight what I’d change first — get in touch.