Website audit services, compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to choose and buy an audit

1. Start from the symptom. Traffic dropped, the site is slow on mobile, a customer could not use it, or conversion fell after a redesign. Each symptom points at a different audit, and buying the wrong one produces a report full of true, irrelevant findings.
2. Ask what tools are run and who reads them. Every audit involves automated scans. The value sits in what a specialist does with the output: which findings are real, which are noise, and which three matter. Ask for the analyst's name and their previous work.
3. Require prioritisation and ownership. A finding without an estimated impact, an effort level and an owning role is not actionable. Insist the deliverable is ordered by expected return rather than by tool category, and that it names who has to do each fix.
4. Book the re-check. Agree a follow-up once the fixes ship, so somebody verifies the changes landed and the numbers moved. Audits that are never re-checked become documents; the re-check is what turns one into a result.

The audit types, and what each finds

A technical search audit examines crawling, indexing, canonicalisation, redirects, structured data and rendering, and answers whether your important pages are in Google's index at all. A performance audit measures against Google's published Core Web Vitals thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of real page loads. A content audit inventories what you have published and decides what should be improved, merged or removed.

An accessibility audit tests against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines using automated scanning plus manual testing, including keyboard-only and screen-reader passes. Automated tools catch only a portion of real barriers, so an accessibility audit that is entirely automated is incomplete by construction. The Department of Justice publishes guidance on web accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act that is worth reading before you scope one.

Tool export or examination?

The cheapest audits are a crawler run through a report template. You can tell from four things: findings ordered by tool category rather than by impact, severity labels inherited straight from the tool, no mention of your business model, and no reference to your own analytics or Search Console data. A real audit connects a technical fact to a commercial consequence, and it says which findings can safely be ignored, which is the part no tool can do.

Price follows that distinction more than it follows site size. Two quotes for the same site can differ several times over, and the difference is usually whether a senior specialist spends days interpreting or an analyst spends hours formatting. Ask how many hours of senior time the fee buys; the answer is the honest version of the quote.

When an audit is not the right purchase

If you already know the problem and have a developer available, buy the fix. If the site is about to be replaced, audit the new build's plan rather than the site being retired. If nothing has changed and nothing has broken, an annual check is enough and the budget belongs in content or acquisition.

Audits earn their money at moments of change: before a migration, after a traffic drop, when a new template ships, or when a legal or accessibility obligation appears. Outside those moments they mostly produce a document that confirms what you suspected, at the price of work you could have shipped instead.

Questions people actually ask

How much of an audit can a free tool do?

Free tools surface broken links, obvious performance problems and missing tags, which is genuinely useful. What they cannot do is decide which findings matter for your business, spot problems that need human judgement, or tell you what to ignore. Run the free scan first and buy the interpretation.

How often should we audit the site?

Annually for a stable site, and additionally at moments of change: before and after a migration, after a redesign, or when traffic or conversions move without explanation. A site that ships weekly is better served by continuous monitoring than by an annual snapshot.

Can one audit cover search, speed and accessibility?

It can cover all three shallowly, which is fine as triage to decide where to look properly. Depth in each comes from a different specialist, and an accessibility audit in particular needs manual testing that a combined package rarely includes.

What should we get at the end?

A prioritised findings list with the evidence, expected impact, effort and an owner for each item, plus the raw data the analysis came from. Ask for the crawl exports and measurement data alongside the document, so the next provider does not have to start again from zero.

Browse agencies by specialty

• SEO agencies with verified facts
• PPC agencies with verified facts
• Social media agencies with verified facts
• Content marketing agencies with verified facts
• Email marketing agencies with verified facts
• Performance marketing agencies with verified facts