How much does a website audit cost?

Do it yourself (free checklist) — €0

Turnaround: An afternoon

Best for: Owners with time, a careful eye, and a willingness to be honest about their own site.

What you get: A structured list of things to check — message clarity, trust signals, mobile, speed, calls-to-action — that you work through yourself.

Watch out for: The hardest mistakes to spot are your own. The thing hurting you most is often the part you stopped noticing years ago, so a self-audit tends to miss the biggest wins.

Automated scan / tool — €0–€50/mo

Turnaround: Seconds

Best for: Owners who want a quick technical health-check (speed, broken links, basic SEO).

What you get: A score and a list of automated flags — page speed, missing meta tags, broken links, mobile warnings.

Watch out for: A robot cannot judge whether your homepage message is clear, whether your photos build trust, or whether your prices are scaring buyers away. Tools catch the technical, never the human.

Fixed-price productized audit — €150–€600

Turnaround: 2–5 days

Best for: Small businesses that want a thorough, human review without the cost or back-and-forth of an agency.

What you get: A whole-funnel review (message, trust, mobile, speed, conversion, SEO, AI-discoverability) delivered as a priority-ordered, plain-English list of fixes — usually a PDF plus a short video walkthrough. No discovery call.

Watch out for: Scope is fixed, so it will not include a custom strategy workshop or implementation. That is the point: you pay for findings, not meetings.

Freelancer — €300–€1,500

Turnaround: 1–3 weeks

Best for: Businesses that want a named expert and some back-and-forth, and can wait.

What you get: A personalised review, usually with a call or two. Quality swings hugely with the individual — a great freelancer is excellent value, an average one is a slow, expensive checklist.

Watch out for: Price and quality vary enormously, turnaround is slower, and you often pay for scoping calls before any actual work happens.

Agency — €1,500–€8,000+

Turnaround: 3–6 weeks

Best for: Larger businesses, complex sites, or companies that want the audit bundled with implementation.

What you get: A deep, multi-person review — often with user testing, analytics deep-dives, and a strategy presentation.

Watch out for: Overkill for a small business. You pay for account managers, meetings, and slide decks. The core findings are rarely ten times better than a €200 fixed-price audit, even though the bill is.

Is a free website audit good enough?

A free DIY checklist or automated scan is a good start and will catch obvious technical issues. But the most valuable findings — an unclear message, weak trust signals, a confusing call-to-action — need a human eye that is not your own. Free is worth doing; it just rarely surfaces the biggest wins.

Why are agency audits so much more expensive?

You are paying for people, process, and meetings: account managers, multiple reviewers, user testing, and a strategy presentation. For a large company that is justified. For a small business, the core list of fixes is rarely worth ten times the price of a fixed-price audit.

What should a website audit actually include?

A good audit covers the whole funnel, not one slice: your homepage message and 5-second clarity, trust signals, mobile experience, page speed, your conversion path and calls-to-action, SEO foundations, and increasingly how discoverable you are to AI tools. Single-axis audits (SEO-only or speed-only) miss where most customers are actually lost.

How long should a website audit take?

An automated scan is instant. A fixed-price productized audit is typically delivered in two to five days. Freelancers usually take one to three weeks, and agencies three to six. Faster is not worse — a focused fixed-scope audit can be both quick and thorough because there are no scoping calls to schedule.

Do I need to be technical to use the results?

You should not have to be. A good audit is written in plain English — "your page loads slowly on phones" rather than "your LCP exceeds 4 seconds" — with each fix explained so you, or whoever maintains your site, can act on it without a developer for most items.