Your website can look perfectly fine and still be quietly leaking customers. Slow on a phone, invisible in Google, a contact form that silently fails: you rarely see these problems yourself, because you are not your own visitor. The good news is that you can check almost all of it for free.
You do not need an expensive agency subscription to find out whether your website actually works. A handful of free tools, most of them made by Google itself, will tell you how fast your site loads, whether Google can find it, if it works on mobile, and whether anything is broken under the hood. In this article we walk through ten free tools we use ourselves, what each one checks, and just as importantly, where they stop being useful. Every tool name links straight to where you can use it.
Prefer the 30-second version? We built a free Website Check that runs 15 of these tests on any site automatically and hands you a score out of 100 plus your top 3 fixes. No account needed.
Why check a website that looks fine?
Because “looks fine on my laptop” is the most expensive assumption in small business. You built the site, you know exactly where to click, and you probably view it on a fast connection with everything cached. Your visitor arrives cold, often on a mid-range phone with a shaky signal, and gives you a few seconds before deciding whether to stay.
Most website problems are invisible from the driver’s seat. A page that takes six seconds to load on mobile, a contact form that stopped sending emails after an update, a page Google never indexed, an image without alt text that locks out screen-reader users, missing security headers: none of these show up when you glance at your homepage. The tools below make the invisible visible, so you can fix a leak before it costs you another month of missed enquiries.
The 10 free website audit tools
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Paste any URL into PageSpeed Insights and Google grades your loading speed on both real-world data and a lab test, then scores your Core Web Vitals. This is the closest thing to an official verdict on speed, and speed is both a ranking factor and a conversion factor. Look for green Core Web Vitals; anything in the red is worth acting on. Free and unlimited.
2. Google Search Console
If you install only one tool, make it Search Console. It shows how Google actually sees your site: which pages are indexed, which searches bring people in, and any coverage or mobile errors Google ran into. It is the difference between guessing and knowing. Free for your own site after a one-time verification.
3. Lighthouse (in Chrome)
Lighthouse is built straight into the Chrome browser (open DevTools, then the Lighthouse tab). One click runs a full audit across four areas: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. It is the fastest way to get an all-round health report of a single page, with concrete suggestions per issue. Free, nothing to install.
4. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a free version of a well-known paid SEO suite, available for websites you own and verify. It runs a site audit that surfaces a health score, broken links, missing meta descriptions and other on-page issues, and gives you a basic view of who links to you. Generous free tier for your own domains.
5. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler that walks your entire site the way a search engine does, then lists every broken link, redirect chain, duplicate title and missing meta tag in one place. It looks technical, but the free version is enough for most small sites. Free up to 500 URLs, which covers the majority of small business websites.
6. WAVE (WebAIM)
WAVE checks accessibility: color contrast that is too low to read, images without alt text, form fields without labels, and headings in the wrong order. Accessibility is not just good manners, it overlaps heavily with SEO and usability. Paste a URL and you get a visual, page-by-page report. Free.
7. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a second opinion on speed that complements PageSpeed Insights. It gives you a detailed waterfall of exactly which files load in which order and where the delay sits, which is invaluable when you want to fix speed rather than just measure it. The free tier limits test locations and history, but is plenty for a periodic check.
8. Schema Markup Validator
Structured data is the code that lets Google show star ratings, FAQs and other rich results. The official Schema Markup Validator, and Google’s own Rich Results Test, tell you whether your markup is valid and what it qualifies for. If you have ever wondered why a competitor gets fancy search results and you do not, start here. Free.
9. Security Headers
Type your domain into Security Headers and it grades your HTTP security headers from A to F. Those headers are a quiet but real part of trust and safety, and most small business sites score poorly simply because nobody ever set them. A quick way to spot low-effort, high-value hardening. Free.
10. UptimeRobot
All the other tools assume your site is online. UptimeRobot checks that assumption around the clock and emails or texts you the moment your website goes down, so you hear it from a robot instead of an annoyed customer. The free tier monitors up to 50 sites at five-minute intervals. Free.
Two honorable mentions worth a minute of your time: Bing Webmaster Tools, which shows how you appear in Bing and, increasingly, in Copilot and other AI answers, and the W3C Markup Validator, which flags broken HTML that can trip up browsers and crawlers.
| Tool | What it checks | Free limit |
|---|---|---|
| PageSpeed Insights | Speed and Core Web Vitals | Unlimited |
| Search Console | Indexing and search performance | Your own site |
| Lighthouse | Performance, accessibility, SEO, best practices | Unlimited, in Chrome |
| Ahrefs Webmaster Tools | SEO site audit and backlinks | Your own domains |
| Screaming Frog | Broken links, redirects, meta tags | Up to 500 URLs |
| WAVE | Accessibility | Unlimited, per page |
| GTmetrix | Speed waterfall and history | Limited locations |
| Schema Markup Validator | Structured data | Unlimited |
| Security Headers | HTTP security headers | Unlimited |
| UptimeRobot | Uptime and downtime alerts | 50 monitors |
Which tools should you start with?
Ten tools in one afternoon is a recipe for a headache and no action. Start with the three Google tools, because together they cover the essentials: PageSpeed Insights for speed, Search Console for whether Google can find and rank you, and Lighthouse for a broad first sweep. Those three alone will surface most of the issues that matter, and they are free forever.
Once you have acted on what those three show you, add Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog for a deeper look at broken links and on-page SEO, then use WAVE, Security Headers and UptimeRobot as targeted checks. Run the full set once as a baseline, fix what you find, then repeat the quick ones every few months. And when your site is technically healthy, make sure it actually converts that traffic, for example by turning visitors into segmented leads with a quiz.
What don’t these tools tell you?
Here is the honest part. Free tools are brilliant at measuring, and useless at prioritizing. Run all ten and you will end up with forty flagged issues across six dashboards, color-coded red and orange, with no idea which one is quietly costing you customers and which is harmless. A tool will tell you that your Largest Contentful Paint is 3.1 seconds. It will not tell you that the real problem is a pricing page where nobody can find the button.
A score is also not a customer. A PageSpeed score of 92 instead of 78 feels better, but it does not automatically mean more enquiries, and chasing the last few points can eat a whole weekend for no business result. Tools measure pieces in isolation; they do not read your site the way a visitor does, they do not know your goals, and they do not connect a slow page, a weak headline and a buried call to action into one story. That reading-between-the-lines is exactly where a human audit earns its keep. It is also the core of how we work with clients: not a longer list of red flags, but a short list of the things that will actually move the needle.
Frequently asked questions
Do these free tools replace a paid audit?
They cover the measurable basics extremely well: speed, indexing, broken links, accessibility, security. What they do not do is prioritize for your specific business or connect the findings into a plan. Think of the free tools as the diagnostic instruments, and a professional audit as the person who reads all the instruments together and tells you what to do first.
How often should I check my website?
Keep uptime monitoring running constantly, since downtime is urgent. For the rest, run a full sweep once as a baseline, then a quick recheck every three months and always after a big change like a redesign, a new plugin or a platform migration. Most silent breakages happen right after an update, so checking then saves the most pain.
What is the single most important tool to start with?
Google Search Console. It is the only tool that shows how Google itself sees your site: which pages are indexed, what people search to find you, and which errors Google hit while crawling. Everything else improves how your site performs, but Search Console tells you whether it is even in the race.
Do I need technical skills to use these tools?
For most of them, no. PageSpeed Insights, WAVE, Security Headers and the Schema validator are paste-a-URL-and-read tools. Lighthouse takes two clicks in Chrome. Screaming Frog and Search Console have a small learning curve, but plenty of free guides walk you through them. If a report leaves you unsure what to fix first, that is a fair signal to ask for help.
Is a high PageSpeed score enough to rank in Google?
No. Speed is one ranking signal among many, and an important one, but Google also weighs relevance, content quality, links and how well your page answers the search. A fast page with thin content will not outrank a slightly slower page that genuinely answers the question. Use speed tools to remove friction, not as your whole SEO strategy.
In closing
You can learn a surprising amount about your own website in a single afternoon, for nothing, with the ten tools above. Start with the three Google ones, run the rest as a baseline, and fix the leaks you find. It is time well spent, and it puts you ahead of most small businesses who never look under the hood at all.
And if you would rather have someone read all of it together and hand you the three things that will actually win you more customers, that is exactly what we do. Request a free website audit and we will go through your site by hand, tools and human judgement combined, and tell you where to start.
