Why our website audit is free and how it differs from Google PageSpeed

When somebody offers something for free, the first sensible question is where the catch is. With our website audit the answer is dull and we will say it outright. It is our way of finding clients. We want you to see the state of your site before you ask us for a price, and to see it in numbers rather than take our word for it. This article is about why we do it that way, what the audit finds, and why we do not simply send you to Google PageSpeed.

You can run one at Free website audit, you do not need to read the article first.

Why we give it away

The reason is commercial and there is nothing mysterious about it. Most people who approach us cannot say what is actually wrong with their site. They know it “is slow” or that “nobody finds us”, but that is a feeling, not a brief. Until we turn that conversation into numbers, we cannot quote a price and you cannot judge whether the price is worth paying.

The audit skips that part of the conversation. Within a minute there is a list of specific things on the table, each one explained. You know what we are talking about, and so do we.

There is also something less pleasant worth admitting: most of what the audit finds is not something we are going to pay for. Fixing it will cost someone time, whether ours or your current supplier's. That is exactly why we want you to see the whole list yourself. If you then decide to have it done elsewhere or to do it yourself, that is fine. It would be worse if you did not know about those problems at all.

What the audit checks

The free audit goes through your home page, and it does so separately as a phone and separately as a computer. That matters, because mobile and desktop results often differ by tens of points and Google judges the mobile version. It looks at four areas:

• Speed and page size. How long loading takes, how much the page weighs and what slows it down the most.
• SEO basics. Titles, descriptions, headings and whether the page is even allowed in the index. A forgotten instruction not to index is a mistake we see surprisingly often.
• SEO for AI. Whether you let language model crawlers in, whether you have structured data and an llms.txt file. On how much that last one actually does, we have a separate article and we are not enthusiastic in it.
• Security. Whether HTTPS is running and whether security headers are set. If we can determine the version of the system the site runs on and it is older than the vendor supports, you will learn that too.

Every finding comes with an explanation of why it matters. A list of items without context would be useless: half the numbers look alarming while meaning nothing, and occasionally it is the small item near the bottom that costs you the most.

Why we do not just send you to Google PageSpeed

Google PageSpeed Insights is a good tool and it is also free. If it were enough, we would have no reason to build our own. It has two limitations, though, that get overlooked in everyday use.

First: it mostly measures speed. Lighthouse, which sits behind PageSpeed, does have an SEO category, but it is a short checklist: is there a title, is there a description, can the page be indexed. It will not tell you whether you let language model crawlers in. It will not tell you whether your security headers are set. It will not tell you which third-party scripts run on the page and where they send data about your visitors. And it will not tell you that the site runs on a version that no longer gets security fixes.

Second: the numbers fluctuate. Lighthouse measures under laboratory conditions and the same measurement gives a different result a few minutes later. Getting 62 once and 71 shortly afterwards is entirely normal, without anything on the site having changed. Anyone who does not know that panics needlessly, or celebrates needlessly.

Which is why we show both numbers side by side

Our audit has its own measurement and needs nobody else for it. When it is available, though, we also pull in the official Google Lighthouse results and show them in the same report.

There is one very practical reason for that. If we showed only our own numbers, you would have every right to ask whether we tune them so the site looks worse and you order something from us. With Google standing next to them, you do not have to ask. Either they agree or they differ, and that is information too.

A difference between them is not an error. Our measurement runs from a different place, at a different time and over a different connection. When the numbers diverge sharply, it usually means your site's performance is unstable, and that is a finding worth attention in itself.

What you leave with

Besides the score and the list of problems you get three things, all without paying:

• A fix pack to download. A ZIP with ready-made files and instructions. Some findings can be dealt with simply by uploading them to the site.
• A link to the report, which you can send to anyone. Typically to your current supplier with the question of what to do about it.
• Saving to PDF, when you need it for an e-mail or a meeting.

Where the limits are

To be honest all the way: the free audit is an automatic check of a single page. The home page. It does not know you have an online store with three thousand products, half of them without a description. It does not know that a form has fallen apart on one particular subpage. And it does not replace a person who goes through the site and tells you whether it makes sense as a whole.

For that we have Audit Komplex at 350 €, which goes through every subpage and gives step-by-step repair instructions. We mention it here because it would not be honest to write a whole article about how free it is and keep quiet about the paid version.

If you have a five-page website, the free audit will very likely tell you almost everything that matters. If you have an online store, it will tell you where you stand on the home page, and that is a good start rather than the full picture.

In closing

If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: run an audit before you start fixing anything. Not necessarily ours, any of them will do. Making decisions about a website without numbers is like diagnosing a car by the noise it makes.

And if it turns up something you do not understand, write to us. Answering a question about a result is not a sales call, it is fifteen minutes of work that will not kill us.

Related reading

When you have the result and do not know what to do with it: Free website audit: how to read the results and what to do next.

What we find most often: 10 mistakes we find most often in website audits.

And if those three abbreviations from the speed measurement interest you: Core Web Vitals in plain language: LCP, INP and CLS.

You can run one right now: Free website audit.