Most agency owners audit a prospect's website the same way: open DevTools, run a speed test, scroll the site on a phone, squint at the page source, write a few notes. It works, and it takes about forty-five minutes per site. Do that for twenty prospects in a week and you have spent fifteen hours on unbilled pre-sales work for people who may never reply.
The second problem is depth. A manual pass catches the obvious things — the site looks dated, the images are heavy, there is no mobile menu. It rarely catches the findings that actually justify a retainer: missing security headers, a canonical tag pointing at the wrong URL, an abandoned plugin still loading on every page, an analytics tag that stopped firing months ago.
This page is the playbook we give agency teams. It covers what to check, in what order, and how to turn the output into a message a business owner cannot dismiss as a template.
Every point below comes from signals collected during the scan.
Measured load behaviour, Core Web Vitals, page weight and render-blocking resources. A slow checkout or a slow landing page is revenue the owner is already losing, which makes it the easiest finding to sell against.
Missing security headers, mixed content, an expiring certificate or an outdated CMS version. These are short, factual and uncomfortable to ignore once someone has written them down.
Titles, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, canonicals, structured data and indexability. Each one is a specific sentence you can lead an email with instead of "your rankings could be better".
CMS, page builder, plugins, analytics and payment tools. An abandoned builder or a decade-old theme tells you whether this is a tune-up conversation or a full rebuild conversation.
Point the Chrome extension at the live tab, or paste the prospect list in bulk. One pass returns all 3,800+ normalized signals in seconds, so the forty-five minutes of manual inspection disappears.
Do not send the whole report. Choose one performance finding, one security or technical finding, and one search finding — three verifiable facts is the sweet spot for a first message.
Export the executive summary under your own logo and agency details, then open with the evidence. The pitch stops being an opinion about their website and becomes a document about their website.
Open with something the recipient can check on their own website in ten seconds.
Your logo, your colours, your agency details — on evidence you did not spend the afternoon collecting.
A defensible answer, built from the site's measurable condition rather than personal taste.
