What a UX audit actually checks (and what you get at the end)
A plain-language guide to UX audits for business websites and apps — what gets reviewed, how issues are ranked, and how to tell a useful audit from a long PDF.
A UX audit is a structured look at how easy your website or app is to use. The goal is simple: find the places where people hesitate, get confused or leave, and fix the ones that matter most.
It is not a redesign, and it should not be a 60-page report nobody reads.
What gets reviewed
A good audit follows the journeys that make you money, not every page.
- The main journeys. Enquiry, sign-up, booking or checkout, walked through step by step on a phone and on a desktop.
- First impressions. Can a new visitor tell what you do and who it is for within a few seconds?
- Navigation and structure. Do labels use words your customers use? Can people find pricing, contact details and key services?
- Forms. Number of fields, error messages, mobile keyboards, and what happens after "Submit".
- Accessibility basics. Text contrast, tap-target sizes, keyboard use and image alternatives — the common WCAG AA issues.
- Speed. Slow pages lose visitors before they see anything. Core Web Vitals give a quick, standard read.
- Analytics, if you have it. Where people drop off confirms what the review found and shows what to fix first.
How issues are ranked
Every finding gets two simple scores:
- Impact — how many people it affects and how close it sits to an enquiry or sale.
- Effort — how hard it is to fix.
High impact and low effort goes to the top. That list is the real output of the audit.
What you should get at the end
- A short list of issues, ranked, each with a screenshot and a specific fix
- A handful of quick wins you can do this week
- A walkthrough call so the findings make sense to whoever will act on them
If you finish an audit not knowing what to change on Monday, the audit was too long.
When an audit is worth it
- You get traffic but few enquiries
- People start sign-up or checkout and do not finish
- You are planning a redesign and want it to fix real problems
Not sure where your site stands? A 15-minute call is usually enough to tell whether a full audit would pay for itself.