What Does a Website Audit Actually Check and How Do You Use the Results?
A website audit runs a set of automated checks against a live page and returns a ranked list of issues, each paired with a fix. On Repolog, one scan covers five areas — SEO, performance (Core Web Vitals), accessibility, security, and AI readiness — in about a minute, with no signup required for a single homepage scan. You use the results by working top-down through the ranking rather than trying to fix everything at once. This applies to any site you can point a scanner at; it does not require code changes, an SDK, or installing anything.
The five areas one scan covers
Each area answers a different question about the same page load.
| Area | What it checks | Example signals |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | On-page structure and metadata | Titles, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy (H1–H6), image alt coverage, Open Graph tags, canonical URLs |
| Performance | Real Core Web Vitals from Lighthouse on mobile emulation | FCP, LCP, TBT, CLS, Speed Index, scored against Google's ranking thresholds |
| Accessibility | axe-core run inside the same live browser load against WCAG 2 rules | Color contrast (AA), alt text, form labels and accessible names, landmark and heading structure, ARIA roles, keyboard and focus-order signals |
| Security | 19 read-only checks across transport, headers, and file exposure | HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options and 6 more; HTTPS enforcement and mixed content; leaked .env / .git / wp-config.php; debug endpoints and admin panels; server version and tech-stack leakage; source map accessibility |
| AI readiness | 18 checks for how AI crawlers and answer engines can read the page | robots.txt access for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended; JSON-LD structured data; sitemap.xml and llms.txt presence; semantic HTML landmarks; author and publication metadata; FAQ patterns |
Accessibility findings are reported down to the exact failing elements, which is what makes them actionable — you get the element, not just the rule name.
How a scan works in practice
- Add your website. Enter a domain, or import sites you already manage. Nothing to install, no code changes, no SDK.
- Run a scan. A real headless browser loads your page and 60+ checks run against it. The full report typically returns in under a minute.
- Read the ranked report. Issues come back ordered, and every issue includes its fix.
The important detail is the headless browser: checks run against a real rendered page load, not a static HTML fetch. That is why performance and accessibility numbers reflect what a visitor's browser actually does.
How to prioritize the fixes
The ranking exists so you don't have to guess. A practical order:
- Fix anything that blocks indexing or crawling first. Canonical errors, robots.txt rules that lock out search or AI crawlers, and broken heading structure affect everything downstream.
- Then take the Core Web Vitals that are failing Google's thresholds. LCP and CLS tend to have the widest blast radius across rankings and user experience.
- Then accessibility failures with a specific failing element. Contrast and missing form labels are usually quick, bounded fixes.
- Then security headers and file exposure. Leaked
.env,.git, orwp-config.phpand exposed debug endpoints are worth treating as urgent even if they rank lower, because they are exposure rather than polish. - Then AI readiness. Structured data, sitemap, llms.txt, and crawler access determine whether AI answer engines can cite you at all.
Re-scan after each batch. Because the report is ranked, the next scan shows whether your fix moved the issue or just changed its position.
When a free one-page scan is enough — and when it isn't
A free homepage scan (one per day, no signup) is enough when you want to:
- Sanity-check a single page before or after a redesign
- Confirm whether a specific problem (slow LCP, contrast failures, a missing sitemap) exists
- Evaluate the tool before committing
You need more than a one-page scan when the work becomes ongoing:
- Multi-page coverage. Issues on category, product, or article templates won't appear in a homepage scan.
- Keyword tracking. Repolog maps each tracked keyword to the page that should rank it, and the next scan grades that page against its keyword. Starter includes 20 research runs per month, Pro 100, pooled across the workspace.
- Search Console integration. This surfaces queries you already get impressions for and flags keywords cannibalized across multiple pages — something a single scan can't see.
- Team use. Importing sites you already manage and pooling research runs across a workspace implies more than one person or property.
Repolog offers a 7-day free trial with $0 due today for the signed-up product; the single homepage scan is the no-signup path. Pricing beyond the trial and the Starter/Pro research-run limits isn't specified in the available material, so check the pricing page before assuming a tier fits.
The short version
An audit checks five things — SEO structure, Core Web Vitals, WCAG accessibility, security exposure, and AI crawler readiness — against a real browser load, then ranks the findings. Use the ranking: fix crawl and indexing blockers, then failing vitals, then element-level accessibility issues, then security exposure, then AI readiness. Start with the free single-page scan; move to tracking and Search Console integration once you're fixing templates and keywords rather than one page.