What a design audit actually looks like, not what agencies tell you

Search "free website audit" and you'll get a hundred agencies offering one. Most of them send you a PDF with a Lighthouse score, three screenshots with red circles on them, and a closing slide about their process. That isn't an audit. That's a pitch with a chart in it.

A real audit tells you what is costing you deals, in what order to fix it, and what you can safely ignore. It should be uncomfortable to read and useful on Monday morning. Here is the shape of one.

Phase 1: who you actually sell to

Nothing about your homepage can be judged without knowing who is supposed to be reading it. So the first job is to write down your ideal customer, then check whether the site is built for them.

We look at three competitors alongside your site, because your buyer is looking at them too, usually in adjacent tabs. If all four sites say "modern platform for growing teams", the problem is not your button colour.

What comes out: a one-page definition of the buyer, and a score for how well the current site speaks to them. If that score is low, everything downstream is decoration.

Phase 2: the path from landing to lead

Next, the route. Where do people land, what do they click, and how many clicks does it take to do the thing you want. We flag anything over three, because every extra step is another place to lose someone who was only half sold to begin with.

This phase usually turns up the same offenders: a nav with eleven items, three competing calls to action in one hero, a pricing page that asks you to contact sales to learn what "contact sales" means, and a demo form with nine fields.

What comes out: a map of the current journey and a redrawn one, with the specific pages that need to exist and the ones that need to be deleted.

Phase 3: colour, type and the thirty-second impression

Now the visual layer, and this is where most audits stop and most agencies get vague. We pull the actual hex values off the site, check the palette against what the buyer expects in your category, and run every text and background pair for contrast against WCAG 2.2 AA.

That last part matters more than people think. If your body copy sits at 3:1 on a pale background, a chunk of your visitors are squinting at your value proposition, and enterprise procurement will eventually ask you about it in writing.

What comes out: the current palette, what fails and why, and a replacement palette if the existing one is working against you.

Phase 4: the laws, applied rather than quoted

Anyone can name Hick's Law. The question is where it is hurting you. We walk the site against Nielsen's heuristics, Fitts's Law on your main actions, Miller's limit on how much you're asking people to hold in their head, proximity, Von Restorff for whether your primary action actually stands out, and serial position for what you've buried in the middle of a list.

Then the unglamorous part: type scale, line length, spacing consistency, states on interactive elements, and whether anything on the page acknowledges a click.

What comes out: findings with a severity tag, each one attached to a page and a fix, not a principle.

Phase 5: trust, words and whether anyone is ready to buy

Most B2B traffic is not ready to talk to you. Gartner's 2026 research found 67% of B2B buyers prefer to buy without a sales rep involved, and 6sense's 2025 study found 94% of buyers have already ranked their vendors before they ever make contact. Which means your website is doing the qualifying whether you designed it to or not.

So we run the five-second test on your homepage, audit the CTA copy word by word, look for the trust signals your category expects (security page, certifications, named customers, real numbers), and check whether there is anything at all for someone who is interested but not ready. If the only option is "book a demo", you are throwing away most of your traffic.

We also check whether an AI answer engine can read you: crawlable text rather than text baked into images, sane heading structure, schema markup, and an FAQ that answers real questions.

Phase 6: the technical and accessibility snapshot

Last, the mechanical layer. Mobile behaviour, Core Web Vitals against Google's "good" thresholds, alt text, focus states, keyboard navigation, and whether the forms actually deliver anywhere.

This phase is quick to run and often the cheapest to fix, which is exactly why it goes last. Fixing your image compression before fixing your positioning is the website equivalent of ironing a shirt you are not going to wear.

What you should get at the end

A real audit hands over five things:

• An executive summary under 200 words, with a score, the top three problems, and the single highest-leverage fix
• A weighted scorecard so you can see which area is dragging the rest down
• Detailed findings with severity tags and page-specific fixes
• A competitor gap table, because context is the difference between "we're fine" and "we're behind"
• A prioritised roadmap: quick wins in the first fortnight, phase two over six weeks, phase three over a quarter, each with effort and impact

And one more thing: an honest note about what could not be verified. Anyone who claims certainty about your conversion rate without access to your analytics is guessing at you.

How to spot a pitch dressed as an audit

Three tells. It leads with their process instead of your problems. It contains invented statistics ("redesigns increase conversions by 400%") with no source. And every finding happens to require the exact package they sell.

A useful audit will tell you when the answer is a copy rewrite rather than a rebuild, or when your site is fine and the real problem is that nobody knows you exist. That answer is worth more than a proposal.