Site audits have a pricing problem: the same twelve checks, wrapped in a 40-page PDF, sold for the cost of a used laptop. You can run those checks yourself in an afternoon. Here's the honest sequence, hour by hour.
Hour one: the index
Search Console, Pages report. Export "Not indexed" with reasons. Anything marked noindex or redirect by design gets ignored. What remains is your real worklist — duplicates, thin pages, canonical confusion. Then run a site: search and sanity-check the count against your CMS's page count. A mismatch of hundreds signals bloat you didn't know you had.
Hour two: speed and mobile
PageSpeed Insights on the homepage, one template article, and your most-visited page. Write down every LCP or CLS failure and its listed cause — the tool names the actual element responsible, which turns "site is slow" into "hero image is 2.4MB" or "cookie banner pushes content". Fixes get scheduled, not guessed.
Hour three: links, internal and broken
Run a free crawler over the site. Export three lists: broken internal links, orphan pages, and redirect chains longer than one hop. Each is a same-day fix with a disproportionate payoff, because they cost you nothing to repair — just editing time.
Hour four: the content ledger
Sort all pages by organic entrances over 12 months. Three groups emerge: winners (top 10% bringing most traffic), sleepers (page-two rankings with impressions), and dead weight (near-zero for a year). Winners get protection — updated, never restructured casually. Sleepers get your next month of refreshes. Dead weight gets deleted or merged with redirects.
What this audit won't tell you
It won't estimate your "domain authority" or compare you to competitors in a scores table. Those numbers feel productive and change nothing. What this audit produces instead is a ranked, costed fix list — the only audit output that has ever actually improved a website.
