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The 12-Point Website Audit Checklist (2026)

You don't need a $130/month tool to know if your website is healthy. These twelve checks cover what actually affects your search ranking and whether visitors stay. Work through them page by page — starting with your homepage.

1. Page title

Unique, under ~60 characters, describes the page, includes what you'd want to rank for. It's the headline in Google results.

2. Meta description

120–160 characters selling the click. Missing one means Google picks random page text instead.

3. One H1 heading per page

Exactly one main heading that states what the page is about, with a logical H2/H3 structure below it.

4. Image alt text

Every meaningful image needs a short description — for accessibility, for image search, and for when images fail to load.

5. Mobile viewport

Without the viewport meta tag your site renders as a shrunken desktop page on phones. Over half your visitors are on phones.

6. Text contrast

Body text needs a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background (WCAG standard). Low-contrast and invisible text is the most commonly missed issue — source-code checkers can't detect it, only rendered-page analysis can.

7. Broken internal links

Every dead link loses a visitor and erodes trust. Check them regularly — links rot as pages get renamed and removed.

8. Response speed

Server response over 2–3 seconds bleeds visitors and hurts ranking. Test from a normal connection, not just your office.

9. Favicon

Small, but its absence looks unfinished in browser tabs and bookmarks.

10. Social preview tags (Open Graph)

Without OG tags, sharing your link on WhatsApp, LinkedIn or X shows a bare URL instead of a rich preview card.

11. Structured data

Schema markup helps Google show rich results (stars, FAQs, business info). Missing it means plainer listings than competitors.

12. robots.txt and sitemap

Make sure robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking your site and a sitemap.xml exists so search engines can find every page.

Checking all of this by hand is a job

Each check is simple; doing all twelve on every page, regularly, is not. That's exactly what automated audits are for.

Run all 12 checks in one scan.
RenderAudit checks everything above — including the rendered-page checks manual tools skip — and scores your site out of 100. Free.

Run a free scan →