10 mistakes we find most often in website audits

When we check websites (in our own audit and when we take over an old site from a client), some mistakes keep coming back. The good news: most of them can be fixed quickly and some you can handle without a developer. Here are the ten most common, sorted by area.

Speed and technology

1. Huge photos

What it is: A photo from a phone or a camera uploaded straight to the site, with no editing. Such a photo can be several megabytes, even though it appears on the page as a small image.

Why it matters: A visitor on a phone has to download all those megabytes. The page loads slowly, it eats their data and some people leave before they even see the photo.

How to fix it: Before you upload a photo, resize it to the width at which it really appears, and save it in a modern format such as WebP or AVIF (smaller files at the same quality). Let images further down the page load only as the visitor scrolls. This is called “lazy loading”: they load lazily, only when they are needed.

2. A slow server response

What it is: Before anything on the page starts loading, the server has to “answer”. On overcrowded cheap hosting, on sites with no cache (finished pages stored temporarily) or with dozens of add-ons, this can take a second or more.

Why it matters: The visitor stares at a white screen. Every other optimization after that is just patching holes.

How to fix it: Turn on the cache, remove add-ons you do not use and if that does not help, consider better hosting. This is a job for your webmaster.

3. Needless scripts

What it is: A chat window nobody uses, three different tracking codes, a slider on the homepage, fonts loaded from three sources. Every such add-on means more code that the browser has to download and run.

Why it matters: Scripts slow down loading and above all how quickly the page reacts to a click, most of all on mobile.

How to fix it: Take stock. For every script, ask: do we use it? Does it bring anything? Throw out what you do not use. You can read more about how Google measures speed in the article Core Web Vitals in plain language.

SEO

4. Missing or identical titles and descriptions

What it is: The title is the blue heading in Google results, the description (meta description) is the text under it. We often see sites where every page has the title “Home | Company” or no description at all.

Why it matters: Google cannot tell how the pages differ, and you look uninteresting in the results. People would rather click your competitors.

How to fix it: Every page needs its own title of up to 60 characters (what the page offers + the city if it helps + the company name) and a description of around 150 characters that convinces a person to click. An administrator can handle it in the CMS.

5. A poor heading structure

What it is: The page has no main heading (H1), or it has five of them. Or headings are used only because they look “nice and big”.

Why it matters: For Google and for screen readers (programs that read websites aloud to blind people), headings are the content of the page. When they are confused, the page is confused.

How to fix it: One H1 that says what the page is about. Below it H2 for the main parts and H3 for the subparts, like the table of contents in a book.

6. A forgotten block on indexing

What it is: While a new site is being built, search engines are told not to put it in their results. After launch, someone forgets about it. The site is live, but for Google it does not exist.

Why it matters: It is the most expensive mistake with the simplest fix. The site can be perfect, but nobody will find it.

How to fix it: Check whether your pages have the tag noindex in their code, and whether the robots.txt file blocks the whole site. Then ask for a recrawl in the free Google Search Console tool.

7. Images with no description (alt text)

What it is: Alt text is a short description of an image in the code. A visitor does not see it, but a screen reader reads it out loud and it tells the search engine what is in the image.

Why it matters: Without a description, images are a blank space for blind visitors and for Google alike. You also lose visits from image search.

How to fix it: For every image, write briefly what it shows, for example “Hairdresser cutting a client's bob”. Not “image1” and not a list of keywords.

Mobile, security and trust

8. A mobile version that is only shrunk down

What it is: On a phone the site looks like a shrunken desktop site. Tiny text, buttons right next to each other, the page scrolls sideways and a pop-up covers the whole screen with no visible close button.

Why it matters: Many customers look you up on their phone first. If they have to zoom in and hit a tiny button, they leave. And Google judges the mobile version of a site first.

How to fix it: The site has to be responsive, that is, adapted to every screen. Text at least 16 pixels, buttons the size of a fingertip and a phone number you can tap to call right away.

9. HTTPS only halfway

What it is: The site has a certificate and a padlock in the browser, but it also works on the insecure http:// address with no redirect. Or some images load over http. Missing security headers are common too: instructions for the browser on how to protect against common attacks.

Why it matters: The browser may show a warning and the visitor loses trust. The worst case is when the certificate expires: the site is then unreachable for most people.

How to fix it: Set up a permanent redirect (301) from http to https, add security headers and watch the expiry date of the certificate. The last one is done for you by Website Guardian.

SEO for AI

10. A website invisible to AI

What it is: The robots.txt file blocks AI bots, the site has neither structured data nor an llms.txt file, and important information (prices, opening hours, the price list) is only in an image or in a PDF.

Why it matters: When a customer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity who does what you do, AI knows nothing about you. Or it knows only what other people have written.

How to fix it: Allow the AI bots that serve search, write important information as text and add structured data. Step by step instructions are in the articles SEO for AI and What is llms.txt.

Who fixes which mistake

How to find out which of these mistakes your website has

Most of them are revealed by our Free audit in a minute (on the homepage, for mobile and desktop). For every mistake you get an explanation and a short fix procedure. We described how to read the results in the article Free website audit: how to read the results.

Mistakes often hide on subpages, though. Complete Audit for 350 € checks every subpage and prepares step by step fix instructions for your administrator, sorted by priority.

And if you do not want the mistakes to come back, Website Guardian checks your site automatically every week and lets you know when something breaks. The first 14 days are free.