Verra Our free website audit. Score your site in under a minute, no email needed.
Check my site
Product
Most free website checkers exist to capture an email and produce a scary number. We wanted one that could be handed to a developer without embarrassment, and that would tell people honestly when their site was already fine.
6 areas
Checked on every run
~30 seconds
From URL to full report
Free
No account, no card
Background
Almost every conversation with a prospective client starts the same way. They suspect something is wrong with their website, they cannot say what, and the last agency told them everything was fine. We were opening the same handful of tools every time and writing the same explanations by hand.
The obvious move was to automate the checks. The less obvious decision was to give the result away in full, including the cases where the honest answer is that nothing needs doing and they should keep their money.
The diagnosis
Auditing a website is easy. Auditing a website that a stranger typed into a public box, quickly enough that they do not leave, without becoming a tool for attacking other people, is the actual engineering problem.
The work
Speed on both phone and computer, TLS and security headers, email authentication, domain and hosting, findability, and whether the page is actually set up to convert. All of it runs concurrently, because the total wait is what loses people, not any single check.
Every address is resolved and checked before anything is fetched, so the tool cannot be aimed at private networks or internal services. Rate limiting sits in front of the whole thing, and results are cached for a day so a repeated request costs nothing.
Names, emails and phone numbers are encrypted individually rather than relying on the database being private. Lookups still work through a separate blind index, so we can find a record without being able to read the contents of the others.
Every finding says what it is, what it costs and what to do about it, and the whole thing prints to a clean PDF. Reports are never indexed by search engines, because nobody wants an audit of their business turning up in a search for it.
Results
Numbers taken from a live run against our own domain, which anyone can repeat. The duration is a full uncached audit including both mobile and desktop analysis.
| Measure | Before | After | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full audit, both devices | By hand, around an hour | 28 seconds | The manual version meant opening six tools and writing up the results. |
| Areas checked | Whatever we remembered | 6, every time | Consistency matters more than breadth when you are comparing two sites. |
| Failed runs from timeouts | Silent, with data missing | Retried once, then reported | A report that quietly omits half its data is worse than one that admits it failed. |
| Cost to the person running it | A sales call | Nothing | No account, no card, and the full report for an email address. |
What we would do differently
We shipped it with a single seventy five second timeout on the speed analysis, which felt generous and was not. A mobile run that overran it by 176 milliseconds threw away the entire mobile half of a report, and because the report still rendered and still looked complete, nothing said the numbers were missing rather than absent. We only caught it by reading a stored result closely. It now makes two attempts inside a smaller budget, and the fix took ten minutes. Designing the failure case properly on day one would have taken five.
Do not take our word for it
The tool is public and free, so the fastest way to judge whether it is any good is to point it at something you already know well.
Built with
A tool your customers can use for free is usually a better first impression than a brochure page. Tell us what your version would do and we will tell you what it would take.
