A 15-Minute Free Website Self-Audit for Small Businesses

• Minute 0–3: Speed with Google PageSpeed Insights
• Minute 3–6: Accessibility with WAVE
• Minute 6–9: Indexing with Google Search Console
• Minute 9–11: Markup with the W3C validator
• Minute 11–13: Mobile layout check
• Minute 13–15: Meta tags
• What to fix first
• If you’d rather have a second pair of eyes

By Taylor Landry

Disclosure: I have a vested interest in one service mentioned near the end of this guide (Take2 Website Check) and may benefit if you use it. Every other tool here is free, made by a third party, and has no connection to me. You can do the whole audit without the service I’m involved with.

Most small-business websites aren’t broken. They’re quietly underperforming. A page takes a little too long to load, a contact button is hard to tap on a phone, or Google never indexed the services page. None of it throws an error, so nobody notices.

The fix starts with looking. Below is a self-audit you can run in about fifteen minutes with free tools. You don’t need a developer to run it, though you may want one for some fixes. Open a notes file and paste in what each tool reports as you go.

§Minute 0–3: Speed with Google PageSpeed Insights

Go to PageSpeed Insights, paste in your homepage URL and run it. Then run it again on your most important inner page, usually a services, menu or booking page.

What to look at:

• Mobile score first. The tool shows mobile and desktop tabs. Many customers will find you on a phone, so start there.
• Core Web Vitals. If there’s enough real-user data, you’ll see field data for Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content appears), Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the page responds) and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the layout jumps around).
• The “Opportunities” and “Diagnostics” lists. These are your to-do list. Common items on small-business sites include oversized images, render-blocking scripts and too many third-party widgets.

The quickest fix is usually images. Resize photos to the size they actually display at, and serve them in a modern format such as WebP. Most site builders and CMS plugins can do this for you.

§Minute 3–6: Accessibility with WAVE

WAVE, from WebAIM, overlays icons on your page that show accessibility errors and alerts. Enter your URL, or install the browser extension if your site needs a login.

Focus on the red Errors first:

• Missing alternative text on images, especially images that are links or buttons.
• Empty links or buttons, such as an icon-only phone button with no label.
• Missing form labels on contact or booking forms.

Then look at the Contrast tab. Light-gray text on white looks elegant in a mockup and is hard to read on a phone in sunlight. Accessibility fixes help every visitor, not just people using assistive technology.

§Minute 6–9: Indexing with Google Search Console

Google Search Console shows how Google sees your site. If you haven’t verified your site yet, that’s the most valuable ten minutes you can spend this week. Verification is a DNS record or an HTML file, and your host’s help docs usually cover it.

Once you’re in:

• Pages report (Indexing → Pages): check which pages are “Not indexed” and why. A key service page marked “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” is worth a closer look.
• URL Inspection: paste in your most important URL to confirm it’s indexed and see when Google last crawled it.
• Sitemaps: submit your sitemap (often /sitemap.xml) if it isn’t listed.
• Performance report: see which search queries actually show your site. The results are often surprising, and they’re useful for rewriting page titles.

If your site is brand new, this report will be thin. That’s normal.

§Minute 9–11: Markup with the W3C validator

The W3C Markup Validation Service checks your HTML against the standard. Don’t panic at a long list. Many warnings are harmless, and site builders generate some you can’t control.

Look for:

• Unclosed or mis-nested elements, which can break layouts in some browsers.
• Duplicate IDs, which can break scripts and form labels.
• Errors inside the <head>, where a stray tag can stop meta tags from being read.

If you use a hosted builder, take the meaningful errors to its support team. If you have a developer, this list is a concrete ticket.

§Minute 11–13: Mobile layout check

Google retired its standalone Mobile-Friendly Test in late 2023, so use these instead:

• Chrome DevTools device mode: open your site in Chrome, press F12 (or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac), then click the phone/tablet icon. Try a few device sizes. See Chrome’s device mode docs.
• Lighthouse: in the same DevTools panel, the Lighthouse tab runs a mobile audit covering performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
• Your actual phone: nothing replaces it. Can you call, get directions or book in two taps? Is any text too small to read without zooming? Does anything run off the side of the screen?

Check that your page includes a viewport tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Without it, phones show a shrunken desktop page.

§Minute 13–15: Meta tags

Right-click your homepage, choose View Page Source, and search (Ctrl+F) for these:

• <title>: unique on each page, and it should say what you do and where. “Home” isn’t a title.
• <meta name="description">: one or two plain sentences that a searcher would actually click. Google may rewrite it, but a good one helps.
• Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image): these control the preview when someone shares your link in a chat app or on social media. The Open Graph protocol page lists the basics.
• <link rel="canonical">: helps prevent duplicate-URL confusion, especially if your site loads with and without www.

Do the same check on two or three inner pages. Copy-pasted titles across every page are a common, easy fix.

§What to fix first

You’ll end up with a long list. Sort it like this:

1. Anything that stops customers from contacting you: broken forms, unlabeled buttons, phone numbers you can’t tap.
2. Indexing problems on pages that make money.
3. Mobile layout and speed, starting with images.
4. Titles and descriptions.
5. Validator warnings that don’t cause visible problems. These can wait.

Run the audit again in a month. The point isn’t a perfect score in any tool. The point is that a customer on a phone can find you, understand you and reach you.

§If you’d rather have a second pair of eyes

If you’d prefer someone else to look over the results with you, Take2 Website Check is one option. (See the disclosure at the top and bottom of this article: I have a vested interest in it.) The free tools above will get you most of the way on their own.

Disclosure: I have a vested interest in Take2 Website Check, the one service linked in the final section, and may benefit if you use it. PageSpeed Insights, WAVE, Google Search Console, the W3C validator, Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse and the Open Graph protocol are independent free resources with no affiliation to me. No statistics in this article are drawn from my own service.