Technical Website Analysis in Canada That Tells You What Is Actually Wrong
A full technical audit of how your site crawls, indexes, loads and tracks, delivered as a ranked fix list rather than a four hundred line export. Every item has an effort estimate and an explanation of why it matters.
- Free sample audit before you commit
- Fixes ranked by value against effort
- Written for humans, not tool output
What does a technical website audit cover?
How search engines find and read your site, how quickly it loads for real users, how it is structured internally, whether your markup is valid, and whether your analytics is telling you the truth about any of it.
The reason technical audits have a bad reputation is that most of them are a tool export with a logo on the front. Four hundred issues, all flagged as important, none prioritised, and no indication of which three actually matter. Nobody acts on that, and the money is wasted.
What is useful is the judgement. Out of everything a crawler flags, usually five to ten items genuinely affect performance and the rest are noise. Knowing which is which requires looking at how the specific site works rather than applying a rule set.
We deliver the audit as a ranked list. Each item says what is wrong, why it matters for your site specifically, what fixing it involves, and roughly what it is worth. It should be possible to hand it straight to a developer without translation.
- Crawling and indexing: what search engines can and cannot reach
- Performance: Core Web Vitals measured on real user data
- Structure: internal linking, URL patterns, duplication, hierarchy
- Measurement: whether analytics and conversion tracking are accurate
What is checked in a technical analysis?
Crawl and index coverage, robots and sitemap configuration, canonicals and duplication, redirects, Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, structured data, internal linking, security, and the accuracy of your analytics setup.
Every finding is verified manually. Tool output is a starting point, not the report.
Crawling and indexing
- Full site crawl with orphan and unreachable pages identified
- Index coverage compared against what should be indexed
- Robots.txt, meta robots and canonical conflicts
- XML sitemap accuracy against the live site
- Redirect chains, loops and broken internal links
- Crawl budget waste on parameters, filters and pagination
Performance and rendering
- Core Web Vitals from field data, not just a lab score
- Render blocking resources and main thread analysis
- Image, font and script weight audited
- JavaScript rendering checked as a search engine would see it
- Mobile usability and viewport issues
- Server response time and caching configuration
Structure and measurement
- Internal linking depth and orphaned content
- Duplicate and near duplicate content across templates
- Structured data validity and eligible rich result types
- Hreflang and geotargeting where relevant
- HTTPS, mixed content and security headers
- Analytics and conversion tracking verified end to end
How is the audit carried out?
Two to three weeks: crawl and gather the data, verify every finding manually, rank by value against effort, then deliver on a call where your developer can ask questions directly.
- Week 1
Access and crawl
Read access to Search Console and analytics, then a full crawl. We look at how the site actually behaves rather than how it is supposed to, which is often a meaningful difference.
- Week 1 to 2
Verify manually
Every automated finding is checked by hand. Crawlers flag a great deal that is either intentional or irrelevant, and reporting that as an issue is how audits become unusable.
- Week 2
Rank by impact
Findings ordered by what they are worth against what they cost to fix. Usually five to ten items carry almost all the value, and those go at the top with everything else below.
- Week 2 to 3
Deliver and explain
Delivered on a call with your developer present if possible, so implementation questions get answered while the reasoning is fresh rather than by email a month later.
What problems do these audits usually find?
The same handful, on most sites. Pages excluded from indexing by accident, duplicate content from parameters or pagination, images destroying mobile performance, and conversion tracking that has been counting the wrong thing for months.
| Problem | How common | Typical impact | Effort to fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages accidentally noindexed or blocked | Very common | Severe, those pages cannot rank at all | Low |
| Duplicate content from parameters or filters | Very common | Moderate, wastes crawl budget and splits signals | Medium |
| Oversized images killing mobile performance | Almost universal | Moderate on ranking, large on conversion | Low |
| Broken or chained redirects | Common | Moderate, loses link value and slows crawling | Low |
| Conversion tracking counting the wrong events | Very common | Severe, every decision made on it is wrong | Low |
| Orphaned pages with no internal links | Common | Moderate, pages effectively invisible | Low |
| Missing or invalid structured data | Common | Small on ranking, real on click through rate | Low |
Tracking problems are the ones worth checking first. If the measurement is wrong, every other decision is being made on bad data.
How is this different from a free automated audit?
Free tools produce a score and a long list of warnings with no context. They cannot tell whether an issue is intentional, whether it affects your site materially, or which three items are worth doing this month.
| Comparison point | Wide Ripples Digital | Free automated audit |
|---|---|---|
| Verification | Every finding checked manually | Rule based, no context applied |
| Prioritisation | Ranked by value against effort | Everything flagged equally |
| Explanation | Why it matters for your site specifically | A generic description of the rule |
| Tracking review | Analytics and conversions verified end to end | Not covered |
| Delivery | A call with your developer, questions answered | A PDF |
| Implementation | Available, or handed over as dev tickets | Your problem |
When should a business run a technical audit?
After a rebuild or migration, when traffic drops without an obvious cause, before investing in SEO or content, or annually as maintenance. Those four cover most situations worth paying for.
Traffic dropped and nobody knows why
Sudden drops usually trace to something specific and fixable: a noindex left after launch, a broken redirect, or a robots change nobody flagged.
After a rebuild or migration
The highest risk moment for any site. Auditing straight after launch catches lost URLs and broken tracking while the fix is still cheap.
Before starting SEO or content
Spending on content that cannot be indexed properly is the most avoidable waste in marketing. The audit tells you whether the foundation holds.
Large or complex sites
Ecommerce, sites with filters and parameters, and anything built on years of plugins accumulate technical debt that stays invisible until it is measured.
When a developer has left
Inheriting a site with no documentation. The audit doubles as a map of what exists, what is configured, and what is quietly broken.
As annual maintenance
Sites drift. Plugins get added, redirects accumulate, pages get orphaned. An annual check keeps small problems from compounding into a rebuild.
What do you get, and what does it cost?
A fixed price audit delivered as a ranked, written report plus a walkthrough call. Implementation is quoted separately so you are free to fix it in house or with anyone else.
Selling the audit separately from the fixes is deliberate. It means the report is not written to justify a retainer, and you can take it to your own team or a different agency without anything being held back.
- Weeks to deliver
- 2 to 3
- Every finding by impact
- Ranked
- Price agreed up front
- Fixed
- To use with any developer
- Yours
Technical audit questions
Ask for the free sample. It covers a portion of your site so you can judge the depth before committing.
Ask us directlyHow often should a technical audit be done?
Annually for most sites, or after any significant change: a redesign, a platform migration, a large content addition. Sites on an SEO retainer get continuous monitoring instead, which catches problems as they appear rather than a year later.
Do you fix the problems or just report them?
Either. Many clients take the report to their own developer, which is exactly what it is written for. Where you would rather we implement, we quote that separately after the audit so the two decisions stay independent.
What access do you need?
Read access to Google Search Console and your analytics, and ideally read access to the CMS. We can audit a site without any of it using only public data, but findings around indexing and tracking accuracy will be much less precise.
Will an audit tell me why my traffic dropped?
Often, yes. Sudden drops usually trace to something specific: a noindex left in place after a launch, a redirect that broke, a robots change, or an algorithm update coinciding with a weakness. A technical audit plus Search Console history normally identifies which.
Is this the same as an SEO audit?
It is the technical half of one. A full SEO audit also covers content, keyword targeting and backlinks. If your concern is that pages are not being found or the site is slow, technical is the right starting point. If pages are indexed but not ranking, you need the content and link side too.
How big does my site need to be for this to be worth it?
Even a twenty page site benefits, though the audit is smaller and cheaper. The value scales with complexity rather than page count. Ecommerce sites, sites with filters and parameters, and anything built on multiple plugins accumulate the most technical debt.
Services that work well alongside this one
- Website OptimizationImplementing the performance fixes the audit finds.
- Search Engine OptimizationThe ongoing programme that follows a clean technical base.
- On Page SEOThe content side, once pages can actually be indexed.
- Campaign Tracking & ReportingFixing measurement so the numbers can be trusted.
- Website MaintenanceKeeping the site from drifting back into the same problems.
- Custom Web DevelopmentWhen the fix is structural rather than configuration.
Find out what is holding your site back before you spend on anything else
We will run a sample audit at no cost so you can see the depth and the format. If the full audit is worth doing, the price is fixed and the report is yours to use with any developer you choose.