What is an audit?
The test is simple: can somebody who is not us act on it. If not, it was a sales document.
What a useful one contains
What is wrong, what each fault is costing you, and what would be done about it, in that order. The order is the point. A list of faults sorted by how easy they are to fix is sorted for the benefit of whoever is fixing them.
What makes one worthless
Being generated. A scanning tool will hand anybody sixty warnings in a coloured PDF, most of which do not matter for a shop with nine pages. Length is the tell: a long report about a small site has not been read by a person.
The other tell is that nothing in it is specific to your trade, your town or your competitors, because nothing in it required looking at them.
What you should be able to do with it
Hand it to a different developer and have them understand the job. An audit that only makes sense if we do the work is not an audit. Ours is free and there is no meeting attached to it: send us the address.
Questions worth asking
How long should one take to read?
Ten minutes for a small site. If it takes an hour, the person who wrote it has moved the work of deciding what matters onto you, which was the part you wanted done.
Will you tell me the site is fine if it is?
Yes, and it happens. Telling somebody their site is basically sound costs us a sale and buys the only thing worth more than one, which is being believed the next time we say something is wrong.
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