Website audit, Toronto and the GTA
A website audit that shows what your customer sees.
Five questions a stranger answers in five seconds, plus the one number Google publishes about your page.
On a phone, on mobile data
The five questions, so you can run them yourself
You do not need the scanner for any of this. It only does it faster, and quotes your own page back at you so the answer is checkable. Run them yourself on your phone first if you prefer. The point of writing them down is that they are the same five questions your next customer asks without thinking about it, and none of them are about how the site looks.
Can they tell what you do?
Open your home page on your phone and read only what appears before you scroll. If the first line is a welcome, a slogan, or your own business name, a stranger still does not know what you sell. What passes is plain: the trade or service named in the first sentence, in the words a customer would use for it rather than the words the industry uses.
Can they tell you serve them?
Search the page for your city. If the only place your service area appears is the footer, or a paragraph three screens down, someone in Brampton has no reason to believe you cover Brampton. Naming the towns you actually cover beats a radius map, and beats the word local on its own.
Can they reach you without hunting?
Tap your phone number. It should start a call, but an iPhone will often dial a plain number on its own, so a number that works for you may not work on every phone. The free website scan checks the page itself. Then count the taps to a contact form: each extra one is a chance to give up. A number that only appears in your schema markup does not count, because a customer cannot see it.
Does the site look looked after?
Check the copyright year in the footer and the last date on anything you publish. A visitor reads an old year as a business that may not answer the phone, whether or not that is fair. The same goes for a blog whose last post is from three years ago, or a copyright line that stopped updating itself.
How long did they wait?
Time it on mobile data, not your office wifi. The wait before anything appears is the one number where your own opinion does not count, because Google measures it and publishes the measurement. Under about two and a half seconds is the line it draws, and most sites that fail it fail on images nobody resized.
What it measures, and what it will not pretend to know
It measures
- What your home page says in the first screen on a phone, quoted back to you word for word so you can check it.
- Whether your service area and phone number are findable and tappable, and how far down the page they sit.
- Google's own measurement of how long the page takes to show anything, on a simulated phone on cellular.
- Signals that a site has been left alone: a stale copyright year, a retired platform version, images still loading over http.
- Whether the page can be reached at all, and if not, exactly what answered instead.
It does not
- Your rankings. The scan does not guess at positions, and anyone who quotes you one from a free scan is guessing. The written audit checks three searches on Google and Google Maps on a named day: a reading of where you stood, not a promise.
- Pages behind a login or a booking system. It reads the home page, because that is the page a stranger lands on.
- Whether your prices are right, or whether the shop down the road is cheaper. It has no way to know either.
- Design taste. It reports what a page says and how long it took, not whether the colors work.
- Sites that turn it away. If a bot check answers instead of your page, you are told that plainly rather than shown a score built on nothing.
One recommendation at the end, and keeping it is on the list
Whatever the result says, the fix list is yours to keep and yours to hand to anyone. Only the last of the three paths below ends in a website redesign, and it is the one recommended least often.
- Keep itMost common
- The most common honest answer for a site that is three or four years old and still clear. You get the short list of what to fix, and the result tells you to save your money.
- Fix a few thingsOften
- The page works but two or three specific things are costing you calls. The list is yours. Hand it to whoever maintains the site, including nobody.
- Start cleanLeast often
- Recommended only when the fixes cost more than the rebuild, which is usually a platform nobody supports any more or a site with no mobile layout at all. If that is the answer, what a rebuild involves and what it costs are both published on this site rather than quoted on a call.
What a website audit costs in Toronto, and what the written website audit buys
Want more than a scan?
A written audit by me, not a scanner.
Beyond the scan, I read every page, check where you show up on Google and Google Maps, set your site beside up to three GTA competitors on a phone, and list the fixes by priority. The fee is credited toward any build booked within 30 days of paying for the audit (the tax on it is not), and the report is yours within three business days.
Fee credited toward a build booked within 30 days of paying
$49 plus tax
Not available to businesses billed in Quebec.
Most shops in Toronto and the GTA sell an audit as a project, and published 2026 rate guides put a small business website audit between roughly 500 and 2,500 CAD. Below that band you are usually buying a tool report with a logo on the cover. Above it, past about 3,000 CAD, you are buying a technical review of a large site: a full crawl, hundreds of pages, a backlink analysis, a migration plan. Consultants here bill around 100 to 200 CAD an hour, so the band is mostly a question of how many hours went into it.
What the top of that band buys is breadth. What it often does not buy is a decision. A forty-page report with a hundred findings sorted by severity is a document, and somebody still has to work out what to do on Monday morning.
The written audit here is $49 plus tax. It reads every page a visitor can reach and checks every link and file on them. It shows where you stand on Google and in Google Maps for three searches, and whether your Google Business Profile agrees with your site. Up to three GTA competitors sit beside you on the same phone screen, and the fixes come in the order worth doing them. Three business days, and a 30-minute call to walk through it if you want one. It is not a backlink analysis or a migration plan, and I would rather say so than let the price imply one.
The number is low on purpose, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving you to look for the catch. The audit is how most of the people who later hire me for a build, at $2,750 plus tax, meet me first, and the credit above is that argument in money: inside the window, you do not pay for the same look twice. If the answer is keep what you have, the report says that. It is yours either way, including if you hand it to somebody else to do.
The free scan, and every automated checker like it, can tell you what is on the page and how long it took to appear. It cannot tell you whether the words are the right words for what you sell, whether the business down the road answers a customer's question better than you do, or which two of nine problems to fix with the one afternoon you have this month. That part is judgment, and it is the difference between a list of findings and an order to do them in.
Before you run it
Or read the background first
If you would rather understand the problem before measuring it, these cover the same ground at length.
Run the free scan first. If it turns up something you want a second opinion on, or you want to talk through website design pricing, that is a twenty minute call. You can also send the question in writing and skip the scan entirely.