Most business owners have no idea whether their website is good. Not really. It looks fine on their own laptop, someone said something nice about it once, and enquiries come in… sometimes. That’s the entire audit.
Here’s the thing: you can find out properly, for free, in about an afternoon. The same categories of checks an agency runs in a paid audit are available as free tools — you just need to know which ones, what to look at, and what a bad number means. So grab a coffee, open your website, and run it through these seven. Fair warning: most sites fail at least two.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights — is your site too slow?
Run it: pagespeed.web.dev — paste your URL, check the mobile tab first (that’s where your customers are).
Look for: the Core Web Vitals assessment and your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). You want LCP under 2.5 seconds and a “Passed” assessment.
Why it matters: speed is money in the most literal way — research by Google and Deloitte found that shaving just 0.1 seconds off mobile load time lifted retail conversions by 8.4%, and 53% of mobile users abandon pages that take longer than three seconds. Meanwhile, only about half of websites pass all three Core Web Vitals on mobile. If yours fails, you’re not unusual — you’re just losing customers quietly.
Quick wins if you fail: oversized images, too many plugins, and cheap hosting are the usual suspects.
2. Google Search Console — what does Google actually think of you?
Run it: search.google.com/search-console — this one needs a free account and site verification, and it’s the single most valuable tool on this list, because it’s not a simulation. It’s Google telling you directly how it sees your site.
Look for: the Performance report (which searches you actually show up for, and how often people click), the Indexing report (pages Google can’t or won’t index — a silent killer), and Core Web Vitals across the whole site.
The moment of truth: check which queries you rank for. Many owners discover their site ranks for their company name and… nothing else. That means customers who don’t already know you can’t find you — the search version of a shop with no sign.
Bonus: set up Bing Webmaster Tools too. It takes ten minutes, and Bing’s index feeds ChatGPT’s web search — so it’s a back door into AI answers.
3. The AI test — do the machines recommend you?
Run it: no tool needed. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and ask each one the way a real customer would: “Who should I consider for [your service] in Singapore?” Run it a few times per platform.
Look for: whether you appear at all, and who does.
Why it matters: this is the fastest-growing way customers shortlist businesses, and it’s the check almost nobody runs on themselves. If competitors come up and you don’t, your content isn’t giving the AI anything credible to cite — a fixable problem, but only once you know it exists. (Our GEO and AEO guides cover the fix in detail.) Some free audit tools like SEOptimer have started scoring “LLM accessibility and citability” too, if you want a structured version of this check.
4. Screaming Frog — the broken stuff you can’t see
Run it: download the Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs — plenty for most SME sites), enter your domain, hit start.
Look for: response code errors (404 dead pages, redirect chains), missing or duplicate page titles, and missing meta descriptions.
Why it matters: this is the tool that behaves like Google’s own crawler, so it finds what a human clicking around never will — the broken links from a page you deleted in 2023, the five pages that all have the same title, the service page with no description at all. Industry data suggests the average website carries thousands of crawl-detected issues; a third of pages are missing meta descriptions entirely. Fixing the top handful is often a weekend job with a real ranking payoff.
5. A mobile reality check — on an actual phone
Run it: no tool at all. Take out your phone (and borrow one of the other platform — iPhone if you’re on Android), open your site over mobile data, not Wi-Fi, and try to do what a customer would: find your services, read a page, fill in the contact form, tap the phone number.
Look for: buttons too small to tap, text you have to pinch-zoom, forms that fight you, anything that makes you sigh.
Why it matters: most of your visitors are on a phone, and a site can look immaculate on the laptop it was built on while being quietly broken where it counts. You will never notice from your desk. Five minutes on a real device tells you more than most dashboards.
6. Semrush’s free checker (or SEOptimer) — the overall report card
Run it: Semrush’s free SEO checker gives you three checks a day with no account; SEOptimer is a good alternative that also grades AI-visibility factors.
Look for: the overall score, and specifically the prioritised issue list — these tools explain each problem in plain language and roughly what to do about it.
Why it matters: this is the closest free thing to a mini-audit: on-page tags, backlinks, speed, mobile, structured data, in one pass. One caution, from honest experience: these tools are good at finding symptoms but poor at judging importance — a missing tag on your privacy page and a broken title on your money-making service page look similar in the report but matter completely differently. Use the score as a temperature check, not gospel.
7. Your own analytics — the five-minute truth serum
Run it: open Google Analytics (or whatever you have) and look at just three things: where visitors come from, which pages they land on, and where they leave.
Look for: the leak. There’s almost always one page where a large share of would-be customers arrive and bounce — often the very page your ads or search rankings feed.
Why it matters: every other tool on this list measures the site in the abstract. This one measures your actual visitors giving up. Finding the one page that’s bleeding enquiries is frequently worth more than every technical fix combined.
What to do with the results
Don’t fix everything — that’s how audits die in a spreadsheet. Instead: fix what’s broken on the pages that make you money first (a slow or broken service page beats fifty tidy-ups elsewhere), then work down. Re-run the checks monthly-ish; ten minutes in Search Console weekly catches problems early. And keep a simple list — URL, issue, fixed date — so you can see whether the numbers actually move.
And if you run all seven and the results are ugly? That’s genuinely useful. You now know precisely why the website isn’t producing — which is a far better position than “it looks fine” and wondering where the enquiries went.
Where Oasis Web Asia comes in
These free tools will show you what’s wrong. What they can’t tell you is what it’s costing you, which fix pays back first, or how to rebuild the pages that matter so they convert — that’s judgement, and it’s where we come in. Run the checks; if the results worry you, we’ll happily go through them with you, translate the findings into business terms, and give you an honest view of whether you need a tune-up or a rebuild. It’s the kind of web development Singapore SMEs actually need: driven by evidence, aimed at enquiries, not just cleaner scores.
If your afternoon of testing turns up more red than green, that’s exactly the conversation we like to have.
Start a conversation → — get a free consultation with our Singapore-based team.