Website Audit Checklist: 12 Reasons Your Site Isn't Converting

A website that brings in no leads rarely has twenty problems. It has two or three, almost always pulled from the same short list, and a methodical do-it-yourself audit is enough to find them. These are the 12 checks we run first when a business owner tells us "I get visitors and no quote requests," grouped so you can work through them in one afternoon with free tools.

First, is it really a conversion problem?

Before you dig into the site, confirm that conversion is actually where it breaks. A website can't generate many leads without a baseline of qualified visitors, and "it doesn't convert" sometimes hides something else entirely. Place yourself in one of these five situations.

• ◆Almost no traffic. The problem is visibility, not conversion. That's an SEO and local-presence job, not a redesign.
• ◆Unqualified traffic. Visitors searching for something else, or outside your area. The message or the targeting is off.
• ◆Qualified traffic that doesn't contact you. This one is a real conversion problem, and the 12 checks below apply directly.
• ◆Requests that never arrive. The form sends, but the notification never lands in the right inbox. The most common failure, and the easiest to miss.
• ◆Requests that arrive but go nowhere. The problem sits further down, in follow-up or sales, not on the site.

Your analytics tool and Search Console answer this in a few minutes. The rest of this article mostly fixes the third and fourth situations.

An audit is not an opinion about your design

Ask three people what's wrong with your site and you'll collect three opinions about the colours. A serious audit doesn't run on opinion. It measures specific things, each tied to a known reason businesses lose clients, and it produces a ranked list of actions instead of a general feeling.

The 12 checks below cover six systems. Each one takes a few minutes, none needs paid software, and each result tells you something precise about the state of your site.

If what you want is the visible symptoms of a site that hurts your business, our article on the 7 signs your website is losing you clients walks through them one by one. This one is about the method for tracing the cause.

The 12 checks, system by system

Measurement: checks 1 and 2

1. An analytics tool is installed, and someone reads it. Confirm that Google Analytics 4, or an equivalent, is live on your site and that you have access to the account. Plenty of small-business sites have no measurement at all, or an account set up by an agency in 2019 that nobody has the password for. Without data, "my site doesn't convert" is a feeling, not a diagnosis.

2. Important actions are set up as key events. A visit pays no invoices. What counts is the form submitted, the tap on your phone number, the quote request. In GA4 these are marked as key events; the word "conversion" now refers to actions tied to Google Ads. Without that tracking, you know how many people visited and never how many took a real action.

What it reveals: a site without measurement is flying blind. Fix this first, because every fix that follows becomes invisible without it.

Speed: checks 3 and 4

3. The mobile score on PageSpeed Insights. Enter your address on PageSpeed Insights, Google's free tool, and read the mobile score rather than the desktop one. A score below 50 signals serious performance problems. Check the real-world Core Web Vitals data too when it shows up, since it is that field data, not the lab score, that Google ties to page experience.

4. Real load time on a phone. Get off wifi, open your homepage on cellular data, and count. Past three seconds, a good share of your visitors have already hit back.

What it reveals: a weak score points to the same culprits nearly every time. Oversized images, bargain hosting, a theme bloated with plugins.

Mobile and message: checks 5 and 6

5. The thumb test. On your phone, fill out your own contact form start to finish. Can you tap the buttons without zooming, read the text without pinching, see every field with the keyboard open? A large share of local searches begins on a phone; that's where the site has to be good.

6. The five-second test. Show your homepage to someone who doesn't know your business, take it away after five seconds, and ask three questions: what does this company sell, for whom, and what's the next step? Three wrong answers point to a message written for yourself instead of the client.

What it reveals: a site designed on a big office screen, never tested in the conditions your clients actually live in.

Technical SEO: checks 7 and 8

7. Indexing. Type site:yourbusiness.ca into Google for a quick spot check: zero results means an invisible site; dozens of old test pages mean a cleanup is due. The site: trick is only a rough sample, though. For a dependable picture, open the index report in Google Search Console, the free tool that shows which pages are indexed, which are blocked, and which searches you show up for.

8. Page titles and your Google Business Profile. Look at how your key pages appear in search results: a title that reads "Home" or just your company name wastes your best card. Then check your Google listing in Maps: address, hours and phone number current, reviews answered.

What it reveals: the difference between a site that's invisible by foundation and one that's invisible by neglect. Both can be fixed, at different budgets. Our guide to SEO pricing in Quebec breaks down what each scenario costs.

Conversion: checks 9 and 10

9. One main action, visible without scrolling. Open every important page and look for the action you're asking for: call, request a quote, book an appointment. If a visitor has to scroll to find it, or pick between six competing buttons, you are adding friction exactly where you can least afford it. Then test your form under real conditions: send yourself a request and time how long a reply takes. We regularly find quote requests sitting unanswered in an inbox nobody checks.

10. Social proof, next to the action. Testimonials, delivered projects, Google reviews, client logos. That validation belongs beside your calls to action, not on a "Testimonials" page nobody opens. Clients here buy on trust; your site has to build it before asking for the contact.

What it reveals: the actual path between a visitor's interest and a request in your inbox. On otherwise healthy sites, this is where the leak usually hides.

Security and Law 25: checks 11 and 12

11. The padlock. Your address should start with https, with no "not secure" warning. An expired certificate triggers a browser security warning that blocks access to the site, and secure delivery is part of Google's page-experience signals.

12. Law 25 compliance. A Quebec business site that collects any personal information, and a simple contact form counts, must publish a privacy policy, obtain consent for non-essential cookies, and name a person responsible. Our Law 25 guide covers the obligations one by one.

What it reveals: the overall maintenance level of the site. An expired padlock or a missing consent banner nearly always signals other neglect under the hood.

What to fix first

A list of problems with no order of priority is still just a list of problems. Here is the order that protects your revenue.

1. ◆Anything blocking a contact. A broken form, a wrong number, an inbox nobody checks: that gets fixed today, not this quarter.
2. ◆Measurement. Set up GA4 and conversion events before the other fixes, or you'll never know which ones worked.
3. ◆Speed and mobile, if the score sits below 50. Every other improvement runs through a page people are willing to wait for.
4. ◆The message and the main action. This is the highest-return fix: the visitors you already have start converting.
5. ◆SEO growth last. Sending more people to a site that doesn't convert means paying to watch visitors leave. A ranking campaign is worth it once the house is in order, and it takes months to pay off. One caveat: a critical indexing problem, like a noindex tag left on by accident, gets fixed right away, not last.

The whole logic fits in one sentence: plug the leak closest to the money first.

Do it yourself, or have it done

An attentive owner can cover the 12 checks above in an afternoon, and the exercise is worth it: even half-finished, it replaces feelings with facts.

What a professional audit adds is interpretation and a plan. Knowing your PageSpeed score is 38 is one thing; knowing whether the cause is the hosting, the theme or the images, and what the fix costs, is another. Our digital audit ($495) analyzes your site, your market and three to five competitors, then hands you a prioritized action plan with a timeline and budget. The report is yours to keep, whether the next step happens with us or not.

The honest answer is this: a recent site that passes all 12 checks doesn't need a paid audit. A site that fails several of them deserves a diagnosis before any redesign, whatever its age, because rebuilding a site without understanding why the old one didn't convert usually produces a new site with the same problems.