How to audit your own website for revenue leaks

You do not need software to find most of what is wrong with a website. You need an hour, a phone, and a willingness to look at your own work as a stranger would.

Ask for a website review

Run the audit in four passes: search for yourself as a customer would, walk the journey on a phone from landing page to enquiry, check what happens after an enquiry arrives, then look at what is recorded. Write findings down without fixing anything until the end, and order the fix list by how many visitors meet each problem.

Set the conditions before you start

The audit is only useful if it recreates a stranger's experience rather than yours. That means a phone, mobile data rather than wifi, and a private browsing window so you are not seeing a cached or logged-in version.

Set aside one uninterrupted hour and open a note. The single most important rule is that you fix nothing while auditing. The moment you start fixing, you stop looking, and the second half of the site never gets examined.

Pass one: can you be found at all?

Search for what you sell the way a customer would phrase it, including the place if location matters. Do not search for your business name, which tells you almost nothing. Note whether you appear, and where.

Then ask an AI assistant to recommend a business like yours in your area and see whether you are named. This is increasingly where a shortlist begins, and being absent from it is a leak that never shows up in any traffic report.

  • Search the service plus the place, not your brand name.
  • Try two or three phrasings a customer would actually use.
  • Check the map results as well as the ordinary ones.
  • Ask an assistant for a recommendation and see who it names.
  • Note which of your pages appears, if any.

Pass two: walk the journey on a phone

Land on the page a search would send somebody to, usually a service page rather than the homepage. Time how long until something readable appears. Then read it the way a busy person would, which is to say quickly and impatiently.

Continue all the way to sending an enquiry. Every hesitation you feel goes in the note: an unclear sentence, a hidden phone number, a form field you did not want to fill, a moment where you were not sure what to do next.

Pass three: what happens after the enquiry

This is the pass almost nobody runs, and it is where a surprising amount of money is found. Confirm your test enquiry actually arrived somewhere a person will see it. Check whether an automatic confirmation was sent, and read it as a customer would.

Then look at your last twenty real enquiries and note two things for each: how many hours until the first reply, and how many messages were sent in total. The pattern is usually clear and usually uncomfortable.

Pass four: what is actually recorded

Open your analytics and try to answer one question: how many enquiries did the website produce last month, and which pages produced them. If you cannot answer, you have found the leak that hides all the others.

Check specifically whether form submissions and taps on the phone number are recorded as events. Analytics installed but never configured is the normal state of affairs, and it produces reports full of visits and empty of outcomes.

Turn the notes into an ordered list

Sort your findings by how many visitors meet each problem, not by how much each one annoyed you. An unclear message on the main service page is met by everybody who arrives. A broken link on a minor page is met by very few.

Then work down the list one item at a time, dating each change. Fixing eight things in an afternoon feels productive and leaves you unable to say which one mattered when the numbers move.

  • Order by reach: how many visitors meet this?
  • Then by cost to fix, so cheap and wide comes first.
  • One change at a time, with the date written down.
  • Re-run the audit after a few months, since leaks return.

When to bring somebody else in

Two findings are worth outside help. The first is anything technical that stops pages being indexed at all, since it can silently keep a whole site invisible. The second is a message problem you cannot see, which is common because you cannot forget what your business does.

Everything else on the typical list is within reach of an owner with an afternoon: shorter forms, a visible phone number, compressed images, proof beside the price, and faster replies.

How Licheo audits

We walk the same chain, from the first search through to the reply after an enquiry, and report plainly where the money is escaping rather than producing a list of hundreds of technical findings sorted by frequency.

The findings are ordered by what they cost you, not by what is easiest to count, and where a figure is not available we say so rather than estimating it.

Part of a larger guide

This page is one part of Where the money escapes. The other parts:

Questions people ask

How do I audit my website myself?
In four passes: search for yourself as a customer would, walk the journey on a phone to sending an enquiry, check what happens after the enquiry arrives, and look at what your analytics actually records. Write everything down and fix nothing until the end.
How long does a useful audit take?
About an hour for the walkthrough, plus a little time reviewing your last twenty enquiries. The discipline matters more than the duration: no fixing while looking, and findings ordered by how many visitors meet them.
Do I need paid tools for this?
Not for most of it. A phone on mobile data and a private browsing window cover the majority. Paid tools help mainly with technical indexing problems and competitor comparison, which are the two areas worth outside help.
What if I find dozens of problems?
Order them by reach rather than by irritation. The message on your main service page affects everybody who arrives; a broken link on a minor page affects almost nobody. Fix in that order, one at a time, dating each change.
How often should I repeat the audit?
Twice a year, and after any significant change or redesign. Leaks come back as pages are added by different people, scripts accumulate, and forms grow fields that somebody needed once.

Have somebody look properly

We walk your whole path, from the first search to the reply after an enquiry, and tell you plainly where the money is escaping.

Ask for a website review Check where you stand