The Digital Doctor
What is checked in a full website audit?
Fifty one automated checks and six areas by hand. Everything in The Vitals, plus a crawl of up to fourteen of your internal pages, the full security exposure set, the rest of Google Lighthouse, and checks on your domain and server that each need a request of their own. It is R7,600 and takes five working days. Every check is named below.
What does it add over The Vitals?
31 automated checks, in five groups. The Vitals covers your homepage and your domain thoroughly. This covers your site.
The rest of your website, not just the homepage
Up to fourteen internal pages fetched, four at a time. The homepage is the page a business has usually maintained. The problems live behind it.
- The rest of your website
- Links that go nowhere
- Whether your pages have their own names in Google
- Descriptions on your other pages
- Main headings across the site
- The map you give search engines
- Image descriptions across the whole site
- Machine-readable details beyond the homepage
- Pages with almost nothing on them
What an attacker can already see
The full security exposure set, the same one sold on its own as the Security Check-Up.
- Whether your website software is a known target
- The add-ons your site runs, and what they give away
- Information your site hands out to anyone who asks
- Whether your login page is open to the whole internet
- Old copies of your site still reachable
The rest of what Google measured
Google runs all of this as part of the same request. The Vitals reports the headline; this reports what is behind it.
- Files that hold up the first thing a visitor sees
- Code your visitors download but never use
- Pictures bigger than the space they fill
- lighthouse_a11y
- Whether the site is built to current standards
- Whether Google can read your homepage properly
Your domain and your server
Checks that each need a request of their own, which is why they sit in the flagship.
- The instructions you give search engines
- What happens when a link is wrong
- Whether your site answers to two addresses
- How quickly your server starts answering
- Whether browsers are told to always use the secure version
- How well your domain itself is protected
Homepage detail
Four the mid tier does not go into.
- Whether the page jumps around while loading
- The size of your homepage code
- Whether your images use a modern format
- How efficiently your server sends the page
- When your domain name expires
And everything in The Vitals
All 29 of them, unchanged. They are explained one by one here, grouped by the question each answers.
- How fast your site loads on a phone
- How easily someone can contact you
- The name Google shows for your site
- The description under your name in Google
- Descriptions on your images
- The padlock in the address bar
- Business details a machine can read
- Whether AI assistants can recommend you
- Whether someone can send email pretending to be you
- How your link looks when someone shares it
- Whether your site is built for phones
- Your main page heading
- Whether you can see who visits you
- What your visitors actually experience
- Whether browsers are warning people away from your site
- Protective settings on your server
- Whether your website software is current
- Links to your social pages
- Whether someone can send email pretending to be you
- Whether your domain can receive email
- How your link looks when someone shares it
- Whether Google knows which address is the real one
- The small icon on your browser tab
- Insecure files on a secure page
- Your privacy and cookie obligations
- The pages people look for before buying
- Whether the site works with a screen reader
- When your security certificate expires
- What your homepage actually weighs
Why does crawling the rest of the site matter?
Because the homepage is the one page a business has usually maintained. Somebody updated it when the prices changed, or when the new logo arrived. The service pages behind it have often not been opened in two years.
That is where things accumulate. Links to a supplier who closed. Four pages sharing one title, competing with each other for the same search. Pages with fifty words on them that Google has nothing to rank. Images nobody described. None of it is visible from the homepage and none of it shows up in a check that only looks there.
How many of my pages get checked?
Up to fourteen, followed from your homepage, four at a time with a pause between them. That bound is deliberate. Requesting hundreds of pages from somebody else’s server as fast as possible looks like an attack, and this business is not going to be the one behaving badly.
For a site with more pages than that, the sample is representative rather than exhaustive, and the report says so rather than implying every page was read.
What is done by hand?
- Everything in The Vitals, including a real test enquiry through your contact form.
- Last post date and profile completeness on every active social platform. A page silent for a year reads as a business that closed.
- What you and your three closest competitors are running in the Meta Ad Library. Free, public, and usually the most persuasive page in the report.
- Google Ads presence, and whether the landing page matches what the ad promised.
- Email list health and follow-up, if you give access.
- Reviews and reputation across Google and Facebook, side by side with competitors.
Do I actually need it?
Often not, and I would rather say so before you pay. The Vitals is enough for most small businesses, because most small business websites are five or six pages and the problems are on the homepage.
Take the Full Body Scan if you have more than about ten pages, if you sell online, or if you want social, advertising and reviews looked at as well. On a five page site the flagship will find less than the price difference is worth, and you should spend the R4,800 on fixing what The Vitals finds instead.
Start with the free check
Ten of these run free on your homepage, instantly. If it finds nothing and you still have no enquiries, that is when a full audit earns its price.
Run the free check