How to Audit a Website Like a Buyer Would

Think about the last time you hired a company. You searched for options, sent a link to a coworker, opened it on your phone, looked for proof and hunted for the next step. Then you decided.

That is how to audit a website: follow the same visit your buyer makes. Take five steps (search, share, open, check, decide), score each one, fix the weakest and run it again.

How do you know if your website is working?

A green SEO score doesn't tell you. Buyers make most of their decision before they talk to you.

6sense's 2025 buyer study collected nearly 4,000 responses from buyers across North America, APAC and EMEA. Buyers chose from one of the four vendors on their Day One shortlist 95% of the time. TrustRadius's 2024 buyer survey asked 2,164 technology buyers in March 2024. Of them, 78% said they picked products they had heard of before they started researching.

So your site is graded while you're not in the room.

Both studies are vendor-run and report what buyers remember about their own purchases. They cover B2B and technology buying, so a neighborhood bakery shouldn't read them as law. They do show the pattern: the shortlist forms early, and a site is part of what forms it.

What does a buyer do in one visit?

Five things, in this order:

1. Search. They ask Google or an AI tool who can help. Can they find you?
2. Share. They send your link to a coworker. Does it look legit?
3. Open. They tap it on a phone. Is it fast, clear and usable?
4. Check. They look for proof. Can they trust you?
5. Decide. They look for the next step. What do they do now?

Each step comes with a thought in the buyer's head. At the search, it is "I need someone who does this." At the share, "Should I send this to my boss?" At the open, "Does this even load?" At the check, "Is this company real?" And at the decision, "OK, how do I start?"

You have done every one of these as a buyer. That's the whole idea. We're all buyers, so the way you judge a site is the way your customers judge yours.

Why score the visit instead of the page?

Most audit tools ask one question: can a crawler read this page? It's a fair question, and the Swift Site Audit asks it too. But a buyer asks others. Do I trust this? Can I use it on my phone? What do I do next?

A page can pass every technical check and still lose the visit. A beautiful site can sit invisible in search. A score for only one half tells you little. So the audit scores the visit as a person lives it, one step at a time.

There is also a reason underneath this that has little to do with scoring. Marketing is full of "they". They search. They compare. They decide. But "they" is us. We all buy things, we all open a link on a phone and judge a company in seconds, and we also sell. The care you'd want from a company you were about to hire is the care your own buyers want from you.

That choice has a cost. A visit score is less precise than a crawl count, and some of it rests on judgment, like whether a first screen is clear. Each step page says where that line falls.

SEO still matters, and nothing here replaces it. Search is the first step of the visit, and the audit's findability checks sit inside it. The difference is where the score stops. A visit doesn't end when a buyer lands on your page, so the score doesn't either.

The audit is also the wrong tool in some cases. If your site has no public homepage yet, or sits behind a login, there is nothing for it to read.

Why don't owners see their own visit?

Because you know the site too well. You built it, or you approved it, so you read it with everything you already know. You also open it on a large screen, on fast office Wi-Fi, often logged in.

Your buyer opens it cold, on a phone, between two other tasks. They don't know what you call your services, which page to click or what the logo means. A score gives you their view without asking a stranger. Asking a stranger helps too, and we'd suggest doing both.

What do you need before you start?

Not much. Have your homepage address ready, a phone with the mobile signal on, and one coworker or friend who doesn't know your business well. Set aside half an hour for the first pass, and have somewhere to write down what you find.

You don't need an account, a login or any access to your site. The audit reads only what a buyer can see.

What does each step check?

Each step is one page of this guide. Here is what the Swift Site Audit looks at for each, in plain words.

Search asks whether Google and AI tools can find and read your page. The audit calls the findability test I built for chrishornak.com, which runs 54 checks.

Share looks at the tags that build a link preview: a title, a description and an image. A link without them looks unfinished in a chat.

Open covers three things. Speed comes from Google PageSpeed Insights. The first screen is read for what you do, who it is for and what to do next. Accessibility runs a WCAG 2.2 A and AA test on your homepage.

Check looks for proof. It has twelve checks, from work shown and named people to reviews on the page, a phone number or address, an About page and a secure connection.

Decide looks for one clear way to take the next step.

Some of these checks are measurements, like speed. Others are judgments, like whether a first screen is clear. Each step page says which is which.

What happened when we audited our own homepage?

We ran our homepage through the Swift Site Audit on 2026-10-16. It scored 73 out of 100. Not bad. Not good enough.

Some findings were real. Our hero didn't say who we help. Our link preview was missing tags, so a shared link looked unfinished.

One finding was the audit's own mistake. It didn't count "Tell us about your project" as a direct ask. We fixed our site and we fixed the audit's rules. Then it scored 93.

Four changes did most of the work:

1. We added the missing link preview tags, so a shared link showed a title, a description and an image.
2. We rewrote the first screen so it says who we help.
3. We fixed the audit's rule for "Tell us about your project", so it counts as a direct ask.
4. We made that ask the one main button on the page, so the others stopped competing with it.

Not everything is fixed. Our phone speed score is still 64. Our proof is still short of full marks. We say so on those pages too.

How did the Swift Site Audit get built?

I've been building tools like this since 2010. In August 2010, Eyeflow Internet Marketing in Pittsburgh released SEOzio, a free web app that scored any URL from 0 to 100. The press release says I came up with the idea. We planned to use it in-house first, then gave it away.

This year I built separate free tools on chrishornak.com. One checks whether Google and AI can read your page. One checks how your link looks when someone shares it. One checks whether anyone outside your site vouches for you.

The first of those tools went up in April. The link preview checker followed on 30 September, and the authority check on 1 October. On 6 October I sat down to merge them.

When I thought about merging them, I saw they were steps of the same visit. Add speed and accessibility and you get the Swift Site Audit. I'm proud of it. It can still get better.

Can you walk through your own visit by hand?

Yes, and it's worth doing once before you run any tool. It takes about fifteen minutes.

1. Open a private browser window, so you aren't logged in and nothing is remembered.
2. Search for what you sell, in the words a buyer would type. Note whether you appear.
3. Paste your homepage link into a chat with yourself. Does it show a title and a picture?
4. Open the page on your phone with Wi-Fi off. How long until you can read the first screen?
5. Give yourself sixty seconds to find proof that the company is real.
6. Look for the next step. Could a stranger tell what to do?

Write down where you stalled. That list is your own audit, and it is usually shorter than you'd fear. Then run the Swift Site Audit and compare the two. Where they agree, you have a clear fix. Where they differ, you've learned something about your own blind spots.

What does every page in this guide have in common?

Each one follows the same shape, so you always know where you are.

It opens with you in the buyer's seat, in a scene you've probably lived. It gives a short answer, with one fact behind it that we've checked at the source. It shows what we found on our own site, including the parts we got wrong. It ends with the fix, in steps you can do today, and with the one line that leads into the next page.

Every page also names its limits. A check can fail, a study can be old, and a score can't see your goals. We would sooner say that plainly than have you find it out later.

How do we keep the audit honest?

A score is only worth reading if you can trust it, so we set a few rules for ours.

It is free to run, and it makes no AI calls, so nothing in it is a guess dressed up as a finding. It doesn't compare you to your rivals, because we can't check rivals fairly in a minute. When it can't check something, it says so and explains why, instead of filling the gap. And when we find it wrong, we fix the rule and say so. That is what happened with "Tell us about your project."

We also ran it on ourselves before we asked anyone else to. A tool that only ever finds problems on other people's sites isn't worth much.

How should you use this guide?

Run the audit on your homepage first. It takes about a minute, and it tells you which step loses the most points.

Then read that step's page. You can read the guide in order, from search to decision, if you'd like the whole picture. Or you can jump straight to the weakest step and come back later.

Fix one thing at a time. Run the audit again after each fix, and write down the date, the score and what you changed. Two or three entries will show you what's working. That log is also the best thing to bring to a consultation.

Who is this guide for?

Owners and founders who sell to other businesses, and the people who run their websites. If a buyer researches you before they call, this guide is for you.

If you sell to people in your own town, a Google Business Profile will matter to you as much as your site does. Our Google Business Profile guide covers that, step by step.

What should you do this week?

Pick the smallest useful loop and run it once.

Run the audit today. Read the page for your weakest step tomorrow. Make one fix the day after, and run the audit again. That's three short sittings, and you'll have a before and after of your own.

If the weakest step is one you can't fix alone, such as proof you don't have yet or a site that needs a rebuild, you now know what to ask for. That is a better starting point for any conversation with a developer or an agency than "my site doesn't work."

What can't an audit see?

Three things.

It reads your homepage only. It makes no AI calls, so it can't tell you what ChatGPT says about you today. And a score can't see your goals.

That last gap is where a person helps. When you work with us, we look at the whole experience and at whether it moves you toward what you want.

FAQ

What is a website audit?

A website audit is a check of how well your site does its job. Most audits score it for search engines. This one scores the visit a person makes.

How long does the Swift Site Audit take?

About a minute on a first run, and it is free. Paste your homepage address and read the result.

What do you do after you get your score?

Find the step that lost the most points and fix that one. Then run the audit again. That's how our own homepage went from 73 to 93.

Want a person to look at your results? Book a free 30-minute consultation. We want your success as much as you do.