Website audit checklist: 12 checks, 30 minutes, real fail rates

Most sites fail several checks at once, not one. Between September 7 and October 12, 2026, we ran homepage audits on small business sites and kept the valid results: 210 homepages, and every percentage below runs on that count. 58 of them (27.6%) failed at least two of the seven basics an automated audit scores. 31 (14.8%) carried three or more broken at once. The seven are ordinary items: title length, sitemap, robots.txt, https, noindex leftovers, the canonical tag and homepage copy length.

Seven of the 12 checks below are automated and carry exact fail rates from those audits; five need your eyes and get manual instructions, no invented numbers. For fixes, our SEO checklist covers 15 repair items; this post is for finding what is broken first.

The 12 checks (about 30 minutes)

Loading and speed

• 1. Load time. No speed numbers exist in the audit records, so this one is manual: run PageSpeed Insights, note the mobile load time, test again after each change.
• 2. One hop to the final page. Redirects were not the fault in this dataset: none of the 210 homepages redirected at crawl time, and every valid URL resolved directly. If yours hops through http, https and www variants, compress that to a single permanent redirect.

Mobile experience

• 3. Open the homepage on a phone. No mobile field exists in the audit data, so no fail rate here. Scroll the whole page: no sideways scroll, text readable without pinch-zoom, buttons sized for a thumb.

Indexability: sitemap, robots.txt, noindex

• 4. XML sitemap present. Audits flagged it missing on 52 of 210 sites (24.8%), one in four. Flags read stored audit fields rather than a fresh re-check, so treat this and the next number as directional.
• 5. robots.txt present. Flagged missing on 23 of 210 (11.0%). No file, no crawl rules, no pointer to the sitemap. Read yours end to end: one Disallow: / line shuts the whole site.
• 6. No noindex on the homepage. Two of 210 carried it (1.0%). Rare, and a full blackout when present, usually a staging leftover. View source, search noindex, delete it.

Core on-page SEO

• 7. Title between 30 and 60 characters. 129 of 210 titles (61.4%) sat outside that range: 83 too long (39.5%), 44 too short (21.0%), 2 empty (1.0%). Count every character, spaces included, in view source.
• 8. A written meta description. The files store none, so this is the second manual check. On each page that matters, write one or two plain sentences; empty fields leave Google composing a snippet from stray text.
• 9. 300 or more words of homepage copy. 4 of 210 (1.9%) sat under the thin-content bar, one at 50 words or fewer. Copy length is a proxy, not a verdict: 183 homepages (87.1%) already carry 1,000 or more words. Treat 300 as a floor, never a target to pad toward.
• 10. Canonical pointing at this page. 31 of 210 (14.8%) had no canonical at all, and 38 (18.1%) pointed elsewhere; 141 (67.1%) matched their own URL. Find rel="canonical" in view source; the address inside should be this page's address.

Structured data

• 11. LocalBusiness markup. Third manual check: no structured-data field exists in this dataset. A short JSON-LD block with your business name, address, phone and opening hours feeds how search engines present local firms.

Trust signals

• 12. https as the primary address. 26 of 210 crawl URLs (12.4%) still started with plain http://. The recorded scheme approximates coverage, not a certificate audit, and a live http:// homepage shows Not Secure in every browser.

What "good" looks like

Check	Pass line	Fail rate in the audits
Title length	30–60 characters	61.4% (129 of 210)
Homepage copy	300+ words	1.9% (4)
XML sitemap	present	24.8% (52)
robots.txt	present	11.0% (23)
noindex tag	absent	1.0% (2)
Primary URL	https	12.4% (26)
Canonical	present, self-pointing	14.8% missing (31), 18.1% elsewhere (38)

Clean means passing all seven: 52 of 210 homepages (24.8%) did. Speed, mobile, meta descriptions and structured data stay out of the table because the dataset stores no fail rates for them.

Red flags that mean call a pro

One broken basic is an owner-size fix. A stack points at a template, a plugin or a staging-to-live habit. The audits caught 31 sites (14.8%) failing three or more checks, 14 (6.7%) failing four or more, and the worst at five of the seven flags. The stacks repeat: title out of range with a missing sitemap (8 sites, 3.8%), title with plain http (8, 3.8%), title plus missing sitemap and robots (6, 2.9%).

Call a pro for three cases: noindex or Disallow: / live on a site you cannot inspect; a canonical chain a theme or plugin sets on every page; an https migration that keeps looping. All three live in code or server settings.

What to ignore

Padding copy toward 1,000 words wastes the afternoon: thin content was the rare failure (1.9%), long copy the norm. Spend the time on the 129 out-of-range titles. Treat any score without a count behind it as an opinion; every percentage in this post carries its count.

Automate the seven

Title length, copy length, sitemap, robots.txt, noindex, canonical and https run in one automated pass. Run the free audit at sitegrade.org and read your seven pass/fail lines next to the table above. In the reference data, 42.4% of homepages (89 of 210) failed nothing but the title, and a quarter (24.8%) passed everything. Half an hour with this list moves you toward the clean column.