Most teams sense something is wrong with their website long before they can say what. The traffic is there, the campaigns are doing their job and conversions still sit flat.
Ask five people on the team why and you’ll get six answers.
That is an expensive place to sit. You rewrite a headline, move a button, maybe rebuild the homepage, and three months later you still can’t say whether you fixed the thing that was actually broken.
A UX audit gives you the real reasons, ranked, so you know what to handle first.
What a UX Audit Actually Covers
The work begins in the shoes of the user.
Someone arrives to a webite with a goal, and the questions worth asking are simple ones. Can they achieve it? Is anything in the way? Every point where the user’s path gets harder than it needs to be goes on the list.
The review covers a few areas:
- Content. The copy, images, video and any other media on a web page. Does it earn the space it takes? Does it point anywhere useful?.
- Information architecture. How the navigation is structured, and whether cross-links help someone move to a sensible next step instead of dead-ending.
- Platform. This is where our developers bring their expertise, looking at the underlying technology and catching gaps like missing heading tags.
- Accessibility. Whether the site works for people using assistive technology, and for anyone whose circumstances make the usual path harder.
- User interface. The front end and the visuals. Is it appealing? Is it easy to read through? Can a visitor finish what they started?
A freshly washed car driving down the street looks great, but whether it is actually running well is a question you answer by opening the hood. Same with a website. The visuals tell you one thing, and the build underneath tells you the rest.
The Roadmap You Get From a UX Audit
Unlike ongoing project work, an audit creates dedicated time to really think about a client’s problem.
What comes out of it is a roadmap. Each problem gets named and tied to the page where it lives, then scoped into work that can actually begin. Presenting it is the satisfying part. Here are our findings, here is what we would do about them, in this order. A client who arrived with a vague sense that the site was letting them down leaves with something they can act on.
The ranking carries as much weight as the findings. No team has unlimited developer hours, so the roadmap says plainly which pieces deserve attention first and what changes will make the most impact.
Some recommendations come down to a prediction about what visitors will do. When that happens, we test it before anyone builds anything. A small experiment on the live site is cheaper than finding out after launch.
The collaboration is my favorite part. Developers look at the build and the performance marketing team looks at how traffic behaves on it, then what comes back gets reconciled into one set of recommendations. Our work with Blue Heron came together that way, with content, creative and performance all in the same room.
Disability is not a fixed category of person. It is a mismatch between someone’s circumstances and how something was built, and any of us can land there for a moment or for a lifetime.
Accessibility Reaches More People Than You Think
Accessibility is where every audit starts, and it is the part of this work I care most about. Most teams picture a small group of users. The reality is much wider.
Every year we run accessibility training across the whole company, and situational disabilities is one of the ideas we keep coming back to. These are the ordinary moments when someone cannot use a site the usual way:
- You skied a little too hard and broke your arm, so the mouse is out and every click happens by keyboard
- There is a new baby asleep on one arm, which leaves you just half your attention and a thumb to hold and operate your phone
- Bright sun outside, and light gray text on a white background has effectively disappeared
- No headphones in a shared office, so a video without captions tells you nothing
It’s critical to understand that “disability” is not a fixed category of person. It is a mismatch between someone’s circumstances and how something was built, and any of us can land there for a moment or for a lifetime. Every one of those situations is served by the same choices that help someone using a screen reader every day.
Accessibility lives in the code as much as the visuals. A page carries markup that assistive technology reads, and that markup either describes the page well, or it does not. That puts this work with our developers as much as our designers.
The cherry on top is that crawlers read a lot of the same code. Heading structure, image descriptions, semantic elements: the work overlaps, so accessibility fixes often improve performance too. That overlap is where you see tangible results, and it is why the performance marketing team joins these conversations early.
Alt text is the clearest example. A description exists so that someone listening to the page knows what the image shows, which means writing it for that person instead of packing it with keywords, defaulting to a file name or leaving it empty.
Plenty of platforms now generate a first draft you can refine, so skipping it is harder to justify than it used to be. Alt text has been an afterthought for a long time. My guess is that changes over the next few.
The Inside-Out Website
Most of what turns up in an audit traces back to one habit. A site gets organized around how the business is structured and how it describes itself, and the reason someone visited the site gets buried. Inside-out language, as we call it internally.
Menus are usually where it shows first. There is a tendency to put every page in the navigation, because more links feel like more help, and what happens instead is that the action a visitor came for disappears into the list. A few sublinks do more, as long as the pages themselves carry strong content and cross-link to each other.
The copy goes the same direction. It runs long, leans on jargon and describes the work the way people inside the company talk about it. You only have so much time to show someone that your solution fits.
In B2B, that costs more than people expect. Someone in a lower role is often the one evaluating you, and they have to sell the idea to their boss. Clear messaging about the problem gives that person the fuel to make the case internally.
One fix handles both.
Let visitors find themselves two ways, by their role or by the problem they arrived with, then cross-link both paths into the same material. Someone thinking “that is my job title” and someone thinking “that is my problem” each get where they are going, and nobody on your side has to guess which message should lead.
“Why Choose Us” Is the Hardest Question to Answer
Every audit surfaces this gap.
A site explains what the company does and where to find it, then goes quiet on the question a buyer needs settled first. It is a hard thing to answer about yourself, since everyone inside the company already knows the answer and stops noticing that a visitor does not.
More copy rarely fixes it. What is missing is proof: data that means something to the person reading, or testimonials from someone in their position. Part of the audit is reminding a client that the question deserves a real answer on the page rather than in a sales call.
People register the state of a site before they read a word.
Your Site Is the Home People Walk Into
People register the state of a site before they read a word. If the design has problems, or if it simply does not hold together, that lands first and colors everything after.
Think about how someone actually arrives. A clean, polished ad on LinkedIn. A print piece with a QR code worth scanning. Both of those assets did their job, and then the site they lead to feels like a different company built it. That gap is jarring, and people leave quickly when the experience feels off.
The layout also has to hold up on whatever device someone happens to be holding, which is rarely a desktop. A page that works beautifully at full width and breaks down on a narrow screen is a page most of your traffic never sees the way it was designed.
Watch for drift. The type, the color, the spacing and the tone should stay recognizable from the ad through the landing page to the form, and every break in that chain is a small reason to give up.
Audit Your Own Site This Afternoon
One thing worth trying today. Take a screenshot of a full page, top to bottom, and look at it from a distance.
Scrolling has trained all of us to take in one band of a page at a time, so the shape of the whole thing stops registering. Zoomed out, it comes back:
- Sections that run too heavy with text
- A missing button
- A page that ends without pointing anywhere
- Places where nothing links to a sensible next step, so the visitor hits a wall and goes back to the search results
That exercise usually turns up two or three problems you could not have named this morning. Which is the point, and also the limit. Seeing twenty problems does not tell you which three to fix first, and the order is where the money is. Sequencing takes people looking at the code, the content and the campaign data at the same time, then working out what actually matters.
So start with the screenshot. If ranking what comes back is where you get stuck, that is the work we do. Reach out, and we can look at your site together.
