--- title: "Website audit: the deep review, explained | FWRD" description: "A website audit that reads every page, profiles your competitors and scores five areas. Every account gets one free deep review, 14 days after go-live." url: "https://fwrd.digital/website-audit" published: "2026-07-22T11:11:04Z" modified: "2026-08-06T16:01:49Z" --- # Website audit: the deep review, explained | FWRD _website audit_ ## Not a score from a tool. An agent that reads your site. Most free website audits measure how fast your page loads. FWRD's deep review reads every page in full, works out which market you are in, profiles your direct competitors and hands back a ranked list of improvements you can apply with one click. It takes 5 to 10 minutes. ## What is a website audit? An examination of how your site is doing and what could be better. In practice there are two kinds. The technical audit measures speed, errors and meta tags: a tool can do that. The editorial audit reads what is actually on your pages, holds it against your market and tells you what to change. Until recently that took a person. ## What does a free website audit tool actually measure? Technology, and it does that well. Google's PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse measure the Core Web Vitals: LCP (loading) should stay under 2.5 seconds, INP (responsiveness) under 200 milliseconds and CLS (layout shift) under 0.1, all at the 75th percentile of your real visitors. Those thresholds come straight from Google Search Central and cost nothing to check. INP replaced FID on 12 March 2024. Two things that score will not tell you. First: on most small-business sites, no individual URL has enough traffic for its own field data, so what you see is the figure for your whole domain: Chrome's CrUX documentation calls that origin-level aggregation. Second: speed is a ranking signal, but a weak one. Google's own Page Experience documentation says there is no single deciding signal and that Search keeps showing the most relevant content even when page experience is sub-par. In 2023 Google removed page experience from its list of ranking systems; as a signal it still exists. So a green tick in a speed tool means your technology is fine. It says nothing about whether your pages promise the right thing, whether your prices appear anywhere, or whether a competitor offers something you do not. ## What a deep review does instead The deep review is an agent, not a scanner. It reads every page of your site in full, infers your niche from that text, searches out your direct competitors, fetches their sites and profiles them. Then comes the gap analysis: what do they have that you do not, and which opportunity is nobody in your market taking. Those gaps become specific suggestions, not advice along the lines of "work on your content". _Two levels_ ## Quick report or deep review? Both run on the same data. The difference is how far the agent goes and what you get back. | Kenmerk | Deep review | Quick report | | --- | --- | --- | | Time to run | 5 to 10 minutes | About a minute | | Your pages | Ja — Every page read in full and assessed | Deels — Numbers and content at a high level | | Competitors | Ja — Niche identified, direct competitors profiled, gaps named | Nee | | Site score | Ja — Five areas plus an overall, compared with your previous report | Nee | | Suggestions | No fixed maximum, ranked from quick win to strategic | Eight at most | | If your connection drops | Ja — Keeps running in the background, emails you when it is done | Deels — Finishes while you watch | | Cost | Credits: your first one is free, one per account | Credits | _The five scored areas: content, search visibility, conversion, technical health and competitive position._ _Under the hood_ ## What happens while you wait. 1. **Collect the data** — Visitor data, Google search data, your form submissions and a crawl for dead links. If there is no traffic yet, the review carries on with content and visibility instead. 2. **Read every page** — A verdict per page plus findings, from genuine strengths to problems graded by severity. This is the main source for everything that follows. 3. **Work out your market** — The agent infers your niche from your own copy. If that is ambiguous, it skips the competitor analysis rather than inventing something. 4. **Find and profile competitors** — Direct competitors in your niche are searched, fetched and profiled: offering, trust signals, whether prices are visible, which calls to action they use. Only real ones, named by domain. 5. **Map gaps and open space** — What they have and you do not (gaps), and what nobody in your market is doing (white space). The first usually becomes a strategic suggestion, the second an opportunity. 6. **Score and write** — Five scores from 0 to 100, five chapters in plain language, insights and a ranked list of suggestions. The bar is deliberately strict: 50 stands for an average small-business site. 7. **Update memory and email you** — What the agent learned goes into your site's memory, so the next report builds on it instead of starting over. Then you get an email that the report is ready. _Data sources_ ## What the review looks at. - **Visitor data** — Visitors, sessions, pageviews and trends from your own GA4 property. - **Google search data** — Clicks, impressions, positions, queries and indexing from Search Console. - **All of your content** — Every page read in full, not just titles and meta tags. - **Form submissions** — How many enquiries came in and which pages produced them. - **A dead-link crawl** — Links that no longer go anywhere, along with the fix. - **Your competitors** — Profiles of direct competitors in your niche, plus the gaps and openings that follow from them. ## What numbers do I get back? Five scores from 0 to 100: content, search visibility, conversion, technical health and competitive position, plus an overall verdict. That overall is a judgement, not an average, and every following report shows the difference against the last one. The scores exist to draw a line over time, not to win once. Without competitor data the competitive score stays empty: an invented number is worse than no number. ## And the suggestions? A ranked list with no fixed maximum: the deep review returns everything the data supports, sorted by impact. Each suggestion is labelled: quick win (apply now, clear gain), strategic (bigger work, or dependent on input from you) or watch (not urgent yet). For comparison, a quick report stops at eight. Every suggestion states what changes, why, and what you can reasonably expect from it. Approve one and the agent carries it out and publishes the change, leaving a restore point in your version history. Applying costs credits; you decide what goes live. If the agent finds problems on our side (certificates, build failures, infrastructure), those are reported to FWRD instead of landing on your to-do list. ## What does it cost, and how do I get the free one? Every account is entitled to one free deep review, once. It unlocks 14 days after your site goes live: any earlier and there is no visitor data yet, so you would spend the entitlement on an analysis without numbers. Once it is available you will see it in your hub, pick "Deep" and start it: zero credits. After that a report costs credits, and you can also have it run on a schedule: daily, weekly or monthly. A report in the first week is not pointless, just different: without visitor data the agent looks at your content and your visibility. As soon as traffic appears, the numbers come into it. And you can close the tab while a deep review runs: the job finishes itself and emails you when the report is ready. ## What an audit does not do An audit changes nothing about your site. That sounds glib, but it is exactly where most website audits die: a PDF arrives and nothing happens. At FWRD the suggestion is the button, which is also why we do not sell the audit as a standalone product: it is the engine under a site that keeps updating itself. One thing stays human: what you offer and who you offer it to. The agent proposes there; it does not decide. ## Deep review The deep review is the full version of the FWRD site report: an agent reads every page of your website, identifies your niche, finds and profiles direct competitors, runs a gap analysis, scores five areas from 0 to 100 and returns a ranked list of improvement suggestions. It takes 5 to 10 minutes, runs as a background job that resumes itself, and emails you when the report is ready. Every account gets one free, unlocking 14 days after the site goes live. ### Gerelateerde begrippen - [Analytics at FWRD](/product/analytics/) - [The self-evolving website](/product/self-evolving-website/) _Read next_ ## From audit to improvement. - [Analytics](/product/analytics/) — Which numbers your site tracks for you, without dashboard admin. - [SEO at FWRD](/product/seo/) — What is handled automatically for your visibility. - [Improve your website](/improve-your-website/) — From suggestion to published change. - [The self-evolving website](/product/self-evolving-website/) — Why the audit is not a standalone product. - [Pricing](/pricing/) — What a plan costs and what credits are for. ## Have your site ==read== by the one that builds it. Start free. Fourteen days after go-live your one free deep review is waiting.