A site audit crawls a client's website and lists the technical problems that hold it back: broken pages and links, missing titles and descriptions, duplicate content, slow pages, mobile problems and more. Each audit gives the site a health score out of 100, and your client reports can show a friendly summary of it.
Before you start
The client needs a website saved under Edit client. Clients without one show Add website instead of a Run button. See Add a client.
The Site audits page
Click Site audits in the sidebar to see every client's website at a glance. The cards at the top show Average health, Sites audited, Errors to fix and audits Running now.
The table lists each client's Health score, Errors, Warnings, Pages and Last audit, with an arrow when the score changed since the audit before. Search by client or website, and use the chips to narrow the list: Needs attention (a score under 75 or any errors), Never audited, Running and Monthly. Sort by lowest health, most errors, most recent audit or name.
Run an audit
- Start the crawl. On the Site audits page, click Run audit (or Re-audit for a site audited before). From a client's report, click Site audit in the toolbar and then Run the first audit or Run a new audit.
- Follow the progress. The audit is queued, then crawled. The audit page shows a progress bar with the number of pages crawled so far, and the Site audits page updates by itself.
- Leave the page if you like. Audits run on our crawler server, so you can close the tab. A crawl takes about a minute per 100 pages.
- Open the results. When it's done, click Results on the Site audits page, or reload the client's audit page.
Changed your mind? Click Cancel audit on the client's audit page.
Read the results
The audit page shows the health score with a label: Excellent (90 and up), Good (75 to 89), Needs work (50 to 74) or Poor (under 50). The score is the share of pages without errors, minus up to 15 points for pages with warnings. Next to it are the counts of Errors, Warnings, Notices and Pages crawled.
- Errors need fixing first: broken pages, server errors, pages that didn't respond, broken internal links, broken images and missing page titles.
- Warnings hurt search performance, like missing meta descriptions, duplicate titles, slow pages or images without alt text.
- Notices are smaller improvements, like titles that are too long or pages with thin content.
Click an issue to see why it matters, how to fix it and example pages. A green "fixed" tag shows how many were fixed since the previous audit.
The line above the issues shows the audit date, how many issues were fixed and how many are new since the previous audit. Click Download all issues (CSV) for every issue with its page and details, ready for a spreadsheet or your developer.
The History table lists earlier audits with their status, pages and score. Click View to open an older one.
Audit settings per client
Open Edit client and find the Site audit card.
- Pages to crawl: up to 100, 250, 500 (the default), 1,000 or 2,000 pages.
- Audit every month: re-crawls automatically when the last audit is 30 days old. Your team gets an alert when new errors appear. See Traffic alerts.
- Render JavaScript: only for sites built with React, Vue or similar that look empty without it. It's slower.
You can run up to 5 audits per client per day. Monthly audits don't count toward this. An audit stops after 45 minutes and shows the pages it reached.
About the crawler
Audits crawl only the client's own website, as ReportFalconBot. It respects robots.txt, including rules for User-agent: ReportFalconBot, and pauses between requests. If robots.txt blocks it, or the site is offline, the audit fails with a message in the history. More about the bot: ReportFalconBot.
Next, see how the results appear for clients in Site health in client reports. Want to try it on any site first? Use the free website audit.