There is an obvious conflict of interest in this article and it is better named than hidden. I run a free audit tool and I also sell audits. So here is the honest division, including the cases where you should keep your money.
What a free tool genuinely finds
More than people assume. Anything measurable from the page itself is well within reach of automation, and a good free tool will find it as reliably as a person would:
- Contrast that is too low to read comfortably
- Images with no text alternative
- Headings that do not form a proper ladder
- Meta titles and descriptions that are missing, duplicated or too long
- Links whose text says nothing about the destination
- Internal links that redirect before arriving
- Layout that shifts while the page loads
- Missing structured data and a broken share card
- Whether an answer engine could quote the page
That list is not a starter set. Those are real problems, they are common, and fixing them is genuinely worth doing. If a free tool finds several, you have useful work to do before anybody needs to be paid.
What automation structurally cannot do
Not “does not currently do” — cannot, because the questions are not about the page in isolation.
| Question | Why a tool cannot answer it |
|---|---|
| Is this page doing more than one job? | Requires knowing what the business wants from it |
| Which three of these forty things matter? | Requires judgement about your customers |
| Where does doubt arrive in this purchase? | Requires reading the offer, not the markup |
| Is the form asking for things nobody needs? | Requires knowing what you do with the data |
| Does the journey between pages make sense? | Requires following a path a crawler does not take |
| Is the offer itself the problem? | Not a property of the page at all |
When the free version is enough
- You have never checked anything. Start free. There is usually enough there to keep you busy for a fortnight.
- Your site is small and simple. One page, one form: the measurable checks cover most of what could be wrong.
- You have very little traffic. Under a few hundred visitors a month, spend the money on finding out whether anybody wants the thing.
- You already know your problem. If you know checkout is where people go, you do not need a survey — you need somebody to look at checkout.
When it is worth paying
- The free checks came back clean and sales are still flat. The mechanics are fine, so the answer is somewhere a tool cannot look.
- You have a list and no idea what to do first. Prioritisation is the product.
- Money passes through several pages. Journeys are exactly where automation stops.
- You need to convince somebody else. A written argument with reasoning is a different artefact from a tool export.
- You are about to spend on a redesign. Cheapest possible moment to find out what is actually wrong.
The trap in the middle
Be careful with the free audit that is not really an audit: a form that collects your address, runs the same automated checks, withholds the results and offers to discuss them on a call. That is a lead form wearing an audit's clothing, and the discussion is a sales meeting.
The test is whether you get the findings immediately, in full, without giving anybody your email. If you do, it is a tool. If you do not, it is a funnel.
How to use both properly
- Run the free checks and fix everything they find. Costs nothing but time.
- Wait a few weeks and see whether anything moved.
- If it did, keep going — you have found your problem.
- If it did not, that is the useful moment to pay somebody, and you will get much more out of it because the obvious things are already done.
Buying an audit before doing step one means paying somebody to tell you things software would have told you free. Every good auditor would rather you arrived with those already handled.
Questions people also ask
Are free website audit tools accurate?
For measurable things, yes — contrast, headings, meta, links and layout shift are objective and automation reads them reliably. What varies is whether the tool explains why each one matters or just lists it.
Why would you give away the checks you sell?
Because they are not what is being sold. The checks are the easy part and they are commoditised. Prioritisation, the journey, and writing findings somebody can act on are the parts worth paying for.
Do free audits require my email?
Some do, and that is the tell. If the results are withheld until you hand over contact details, you are filling in a lead form. The tool on this site asks for nothing.
How much should a paid audit cost?
For a small site, several hundred dollars is normal — conversion consultants generally bill $100–300 an hour. Well below that usually means automated output with a cover page.