Auditing & protecting your website with free tools

What is auditing and why do I need it?

It’s a good idea to get yearly check-ups by your doctor, so they can analyze the basic state of your overall health and catch potential issues early. It’s not that different for your website or web app. In order to not be caught off-guard by potential issues, or even to find low hanging fruits that can help boost your business, you should perform regular audits of your sites. The easiest way to do that is to use the plethora of free tools available.

I’ve done hundreds of audits during my career, which started in the late ’90s, when the Internet began to crystalize into what it is today. As you can imagine, I’ve battled tested lots of tools over the years and made a shortlist of the most useful ones, which I decided to share with you in this article and get you on your way to a better online presence. What you’re about to read covers much more than security – it’s an attempt to get you acquainted with the best tools for assessing the health of your website from multiple different points of view, so grab a coffee and let’s get started!

Key areas required for a full audit

Here’s a summary of the most important areas you can audit with free tools:

Best practices, accessibility and code validation
Design, user flows and user experience (UX)
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Page speed and performance (CRUX)
Semantics and search engine optimization (SEO)
Content strategy, social media shareability
Security
Monitoring and maintenance

Before we dive deep into each of these categories, a word of warning: some of these tools might overwhelm your servers if your hosting is on a hobby / free plan, so keep an eye on the usage stats there. Also, depending on how many security measures your servers have in place, some of these tools might get rate limited and stop working, especially if they’re crawling multiple pages on your site. Usually, that’s fixed by just waiting 24h before trying to use them again, or whitelisting their IPs in your firewall or hosting service.

Wrapping up the free audit

Phew!

That was a lot of content to go through, and a truckload of tools to check out. I hope their findings are enough to get you fired up about fixing them – at least the more important ones. Realistically speaking, very few websites are “perfect” in all regards, and there are diminishing returns if you’re a “completionist” attempting to fix every single item on these lists. That isn’t the point of this exercise.

Instead, you should focus on getting a holistic view on the health of your web property and figuring out the most important things to fix going forward.

What’s next? The benefits of professional auditing tools and consultants

Even though they’re a wonderful starting point, the free tools you’ve used in this article are a bit limited.

For example, some of these free tools get you 80% of the information you need to improve your website in some areas (e.g. for CRUX optimization, you don’t need much more than what the free tools give you to understand and fix your performance issues), but some of them just get you 10-20% of the potential issues, and digging deeper requires more specialized – usually paid – tools. Free tools only scratch the surface of web security, but Pentest-Tools.com has a great platform that mixes over 20 deep scanning security tools which can, on aggregate, give you a comprehensive view of your entire attack surface and can centralize all your security issues, allowing for a single prioritized report to be generated based on the severity of those issues. And that’s just an example which I happen to endorse implicitly. :)

Besides the breadth of knowledge you can get from all the free tools, you also need to define, organize, assess impact and prioritize all the findings you have after this audit, in order to first invest energy into fixing the issues that get you the most impact per spent time. This is an entire job in itself, and you might need the specialized help of a professional consultant, or someone experienced enough to estimate effort and reward for each of the items on the list.

Apart from what free tools can tell you about your website or web app, having professional help might also yield valuable insights into aspects of your business that need a more involved analysis, like:

deep diving into SEO – putting Google Search Console and your Analytics tools of choice under a microscope, corroborating that information with analyses made with professional SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, ScreamingFrog and others,
conversion rate optimization tactics that are industry-specific for you and how they may apply to your business in particular,
revenue stream optimization – analyzing ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), LTV (LifeTime Value), AOV (Average Order Value) and the general pricing strategy, as they apply to your business model (SaaS, eCommerce, consultancy, etc) and coming up with pricing realignments or repositioning strategies to improve those KPIs,
customer satisfaction maximization – looking at what your customers really want, how well you deliver that to them and what you need to do to improve your product, service or offering along those lines,
business process redesign – analyzing if there is some process or area of your business that needs to either use more streamlined processes, more specialized tools or additional talent, a well connected consultant can get you the help you need or even suggest new processes you should adopt,
full on pivoting assistance – if you feel that the results of all these analyses point to a lack of Product-Market-Pricing fit, a professional consultant might be able to guide you through a repositioning or even a full business pivot to another market, unique value proposition or core audience

…and so on.

My point is: free tools aren’t a panacea. They’re a great starting point, and if you care about your online business, you’ll probably want to dig deeper.

I hope this article helps direct you on the right path to a better online presence!

What is auditing and why do I need it?

Key areas required for a full audit

1. Best practices, accessibility and code validation

2. Design, user flows and user experience (UX)

3. Tracking and conversion rate optimization (CRO)

4. Page speed, performance, core web vitals (CRUX)

5. Semantics and search engine optimization (SEO)

6. Content strategy and social media shareability

7. Reputation and security

8. Monitoring and maintenance

Wrapping up the free audit

What’s next? The benefits of professional auditing tools and consultants