Website UX Audit: What It Checks, How to Run One and a 20-Point Checklist

A website UX audit checks how easy it is for a visitor to understand what you offer, find what they need and send an enquiry or buy. It’s done when the visitors are there but the enquiries aren’t: the ads work, traffic comes in, but people disappear somewhere between the first screen and the form.

Below: what a UX audit checks, how it’s done and with which tools, what the report should contain, and a 20-point checklist you can use to check your own site in an hour.

What a UX audit is in plain words

UX (user experience) is a person’s experience on your site: whether it’s clear where to click, whether they find the answer quickly, whether anything gets in the way of the enquiry. A UX audit looks for the places where that path breaks and explains how to fix them.

Similar terms are often used alongside it:

In practice a good audit combines all of these. The name matters less than the result: a list of specific problems with priorities and solutions.

When a website needs a UX audit

• There’s traffic, but few enquiries. Ads bring people in, but the enquiry conversion rate is lower than you expected, or lower than it used to be.
• Far fewer enquiries come from phones than from desktops, even though more visitors come from phones. That’s almost always a mobile version problem.
• People reach the form but don’t submit it. The funnel shows a sharp drop at one step.
• Your sales team keeps answering the same questions whose answers should be on the site.
• You’re planning a redesign. An audit before a redesign shows what to change, so you don’t rebuild what already works. More in our article on website redesign.
• Metrics dropped after a redesign. You need to understand what broke.

If there are no enquiries at all, check the technical side first: are form submissions actually arriving? Sometimes the problem isn’t UX but emails landing in spam. How to set this up reliably is in our article on website CRM integration.

What a UX audit checks

• The first screen. Is it clear within 5 seconds what you do, for whom, and what to do next?
• Navigation and structure. Can a visitor find the service they need in one or two clicks? Are sections named in the customer’s words rather than internal company terms?
• Service and product pages. Do they have a price or at least a range, timelines, what’s included, examples of work, answers to typical questions?
• Forms and the path to an enquiry. How many fields, which are required, what happens after submission, is there an alternative such as phone or messenger?
• The mobile version. Does everything work as well on a phone as on a desktop?
• Speed. Are people leaving before the page loads?
• Trust. Case studies, reviews, real photos, contacts, address, company information.
• Content. Does the copy answer customers’ questions, or is it filler and self-praise instead of facts?
• Accessibility. Text contrast, font size, whether the site can be used with a keyboard.

How a UX audit works: 5 stages

1. Goals and audience

First agree on what counts as success: an enquiry, a call, a purchase, a catalogue download. And who your customers are, where they come from, what matters to them. Without this, the audit turns into a list of personal tastes.

2. Data analysis

In Google Analytics, look at which pages people enter and leave on, where the funnel breaks, how behaviour differs between phone and desktop, and which sources bring the people who do send enquiries. In Search Console, look at which queries bring people to the site and whether the page matches what they were looking for.

3. User behaviour

Heatmaps show where people click and how far they scroll. Session recordings show how individual people move through the site: where they pause, what they look for, where they abandon the form. There are services with a free plan for this, such as Microsoft Clarity. A few dozen watched recordings often tell you more than weeks of arguing about design.

4. Expert review

The site is checked against well-known usability principles. The best known are Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics: does the person see what’s going on, does the site speak their language, is it easy to fix a mistake, is the interface consistent. The expert goes through the key scenarios (“find a service and send an enquiry”, “compare plans”, “find the contacts”) and records what gets in the way.

5. Testing with people

The most convincing method is to give a few real people a task on your site and watch in silence. You don’t need dozens of participants: according to Nielsen Norman Group research, five participants find about 85% of usability problems. Several small tests after each change are better than one big one.

How to run a 5-person test yourself

You don’t need a lab for your first test. You need five people similar to your customers (not colleagues who know the site) and an hour for each.

1. Write 3–4 tasks the way a customer would put them: “Find out how much ventilation installation for a 500 m² warehouse will cost and send an enquiry.” Don’t hint at button or section names in the task.
2. Ask them to think aloud: what they’re looking for, what they see, what they expect after a click.
3. Stay silent and don’t help. The most valuable moments are when the person stops, goes back or says “I don’t get where to go here”. If you give a hint, you won’t see them.
4. Record the screen and voice, with the participant’s permission. It’s easier to show the team afterwards where exactly the problem came up.
5. After five sessions, write down the problems that came up for at least two people. That’s your first list of fixes.

It’s best to test on a phone: that way you’ll see the site through the eyes of most of your customers.

UX audit tools

The last item is the most underrated. Your sales team hears every day what people find confusing, and that’s a free source of ideas for the audit.

The most common problems that cost a site enquiries

A first screen that says nothing

A big slogan like “Driving your business forward” and a photo of a handshake. The visitor can’t tell whether they’re in the right place and leaves. The first screen should answer three questions: what you do, for whom, and what to do next.

A form that scares people off

Ten required fields, a CAPTCHA, a cryptic error after submission. Every field is another reason to put the enquiry off. How much form length matters is clear from online stores: according to the Baymard Institute, shoppers abandon about 70% of carts on average, and 17% do so precisely because checkout is too long or complicated. Meanwhile an optimal checkout fits into 7–8 fields. For a service enquiry, a name, a phone number and, if needed, one question about the task are usually enough. More on forms, messengers and calls in our article on website CRM integration.

Hidden contacts and no trust signals

A phone number only on the Contact page, no address, no case studies, no reviews, no faces of the team. For high-ticket services and B2B this is critical: people are looking for proof that the company is real and has done similar work before.

Navigation built around the company, not the customer

Sections are named the way the company refers to them internally, or follow its internal department structure. The customer is looking for their problem, not your org chart.

A mobile version that’s just a shrunken desktop

Tiny text, buttons that are hard to hit, tables that spill off the screen, a form hidden by the keyboard. How to check your mobile version in 15 minutes is in our article on responsive design.

UX audit for an online store: what to check separately

In a store, the catalogue, product page and checkout are added to the general items, and that’s where most money is lost. According to the Baymard Institute (a survey of US shoppers, excluding those who were “just browsing”), the most common reasons for abandoning a cart are:

Check the catalogue separately: do filters work on a phone, is it clear how many products were found, do selected filters survive going into a product page and back? More in our article on cart abandonment.

Website self-check: a 20-point checklist

Go through it on a phone, since that’s how most of your customers see the site. Every “no” is a candidate for fixing.

First screen

1. Within 5 seconds it’s clear what you do and for whom.
2. The heading is about the customer and their problem, not a slogan.
3. The main action is visible: an enquiry, quote or call button.
4. A phone number or messenger is available without scrolling.

Navigation

5. The service you need is one or two clicks from the home page.
6. Menu items are named in the customer’s words.
7. From any page it’s clear where you are and how to go back.

Service and product pages

8. There’s a price or price range and an explanation of what it depends on.
9. There are timelines and project stages.
10. There are examples of work or case studies for this specific service.
11. There are answers to the questions customers most often ask your sales team.

Forms

12. No more than 3–4 required fields for an ordinary enquiry.
13. The phone field opens a numeric keypad.
14. After submission, the person sees a clear confirmation.
15. A test enquiry actually reaches a sales rep. Check it right now.

Mobile version and speed

16. The page can’t be scrolled sideways, and text is readable without zooming.
17. The home page and service pages load quickly over mobile data.
18. Nothing jumps around while loading. How to measure this is in our article on website loading speed.

Trust

19. There are real case studies, reviews with names, photos of the team or production.
20. There are full contact details: address, opening hours, the company’s legal name.

Can you do a UX audit yourself?

Partly, yes. The checklist above, free heatmaps and session recordings and a five-person test will find most of the obvious problems. That’s enough to fix the basics: hidden contacts, a long form, a confusing first screen. Which behavioural principles are worth testing on a website and which are myths is covered in our article on neuromarketing on websites.

The limitation of a self-audit is your own blind spot. You know your site and your product, so you don’t notice what’s unclear to a newcomer. An outside view helps when:

• the obvious has been fixed but conversion isn’t growing;
• the funnel is complex: several steps, a calculator, a cart, a customer account;
• a redesign is coming and you need to understand what to build into the new site.

In scope, an expert audit of a small site usually takes from a few days to two weeks. With user testing and analysis of several weeks of behavioural data, longer.

What a UX audit report should contain

A good report isn’t a presentation with general advice but a working list. For each problem:

• where: the page and the specific element, with a screenshot;
• what’s wrong: what exactly gets in the person’s way, and what that’s based on: analytics data, session recordings, test results or a usability principle;
• how to fix it: a specific change, ideally with an example;
• priority: how much it affects enquiries and how much it costs to fix.

A report without priorities is hard to use: nobody will fix fifty items of equal weight.

What to do after the audit

1. Start with what gives the most for the least money. Shortening a form, adding a phone number to the header, rewriting the first-screen heading: that’s hours of work, not weeks.
2. Measure the result. Record the conversion rate before the changes and compare a few weeks later. Sites with a lot of traffic can test two versions at once.
3. Review the copy. Often the main problem isn’t the design but that the pages don’t answer customers’ questions. How to fix that is in our article on website content creation.
4. If there are many problems and they’re fundamental (structure, mobile version, CMS), targeted fixes may cost more than a redesign. Then the audit becomes the brief for a new site. How to write one is in our article on the website development specification.

A website isn’t a one-off project. Even after a good audit, it’s worth going through the checklist above every few months and looking at your analytics: customer behaviour changes, and the site should change with it.