I Ran a Full Website Audit on My Site — Here's What I Found

I built a website audit tool. Then I ran it on my own site. That was humbling.

You know how it goes — you launch a project, add features, ship fixes, and you’re pretty sure everything is fine. Then you take a hard look at your own work through the same lens you built for everyone else, and well… let’s just say I found things.

Here’s what the audit turned up, what I fixed, and what I wish I’d caught earlier.

The Setup

I pointed our Website Audit tool at freewebcheck.pages.dev with a crawl depth of 3 — enough to hit the homepage, all tool pages, blog posts, glossary, FAQ, and the legal pages. About 25 pages total.

The tool checks four areas: on-page SEO, technical health, content quality, and accessibility. Each page gets a score, and the report groups issues by severity. I felt confident going in. I did not stay confident for long.

What I Found

Missing Meta Descriptions

A handful of pages had no meta description at all. Not blank — missing. The HTML just skipped the tag entirely. That means Google would either display nothing or auto-generate a snippet from whatever random text it found first on the page.

The fix was straightforward: add a concise, keyword-rich description to each page. But the lesson stuck — it’s easy to add a new page and forget the meta tags, especially when you’re focused on functionality.

Mixed Content Warnings

A few images were loading over HTTP instead of HTTPS. Modern browsers flag this as mixed content, and some will block the images entirely. The interesting part is that I never noticed because the browser handled it silently — the image just didn’t load, and I assumed it was a slow network.

Turns out I’d hardcoded a couple of image URLs with http:// in a blog post. Easy fix, but embarrassing.

Accessibility Gaps

This one stung. I’d been careful about heading structure and alt text, but the audit flagged several <button> elements without accessible names, a form field missing an associated <label>, and two images with empty alt attributes.

The buttons were icon-only toggles (dark mode, mobile menu) that relied on visual context. Screen reader users would hear “button” with no indication of what the button does. Adding aria-label fixed it in minutes.

The missing label was on the glossary search field — it had a placeholder but no explicit label. Placeholders disappear when you start typing, so someone using a screen reader would lose all context.

Duplicate Title Tags

The privacy policy and terms pages had the same title tag format. Not a huge deal for those pages since they rarely rank for the same queries, but it’s a pattern that scales poorly. If you have 50 blog posts and half share similar titles, you’re competing with yourself in search results.

What I Fixed Right Away

The critical and high-severity issues took about an afternoon to clean up:

• Added missing meta descriptions to 3 pages
• Switched mixed content URLs to HTTPS
• Added aria-labels to icon buttons
• Fixed the glossary search label
• Rewrote a couple of duplicate title tags

The tool re-scores pages after each check, so I ran the audit again and watched the overall score climb from 72 to 88. That felt good.

What I’m Still Working On

Some issues aren’t one-and-done fixes:

• Content length — a few pages are thin on content. The tool flags anything under 300 words. I’m slowly expanding those pages with more useful information.
• Readability — some of my blog posts score lower than I’d like on readability. I’m going back to simplify sentences and break up long paragraphs.
• Internal linking — the audit found pages with zero internal links pointing to them. I’m adding contextual links where it makes sense.

What Surprised Me

A few things didn’t trigger any warnings:

• Canonical URLs — every page had a proper canonical tag pointing to the right URL. No duplicates.
• Heading structure — all pages had a single H1 followed by properly nested H2s and H3s.
• HTTPS enforcement — no pages were accessible over HTTP. The redirect chain was clean.
• Structured data — the FAQPage and breadcrumb schemas were valid.

It’s nice to know some things are working.

Run Your Own Audit

If you’re curious about your own site’, run a free audit. No need to sign up or create an account. Just type in a URL and see what comes back.

I can’t promise you’ll enjoy the results. But I can promise you’ll learn something.