Choose which pages to audit
List your top five landing pages by spend or by leads. Do not audit everything. Five pages that carry most of your traffic cover most of the risk. Put the list in a sheet and keep the same one for a quarter so you can see change over time.
Step 1: Read the numbers
In Google Analytics, check each page for last month against the month before:
- Visitors and the share by source.
- Conversion rate to your main goal.
- Engagement rate, or bounce rate if you use an older setup.
- The split between mobile and desktop.
Look for movement, not perfection. A page whose conversion rate fell by a quarter needs attention more than one that is steady at a modest figure.
Step 2: Watch real behaviour
Open the scroll maps and recordings in Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity. Answer three questions per page: where do most people stop scrolling, do they reach the main button, and what do they click that is not clickable? Watch five recordings of visitors who left without converting. Patterns show up after the fifth. The method for deeper research is in How to run qualitative research.
Step 3: Check message match
Open every live ad that points to the page, click through and read the headline. Does the page finish the sentence the ad started? If the ad promises "a checklist for onboarding" and the page leads with company history, you are losing people at the door. Fix the headline before touching anything else.
Step 4: Test the technical basics
Do these on a phone and on a desktop:
- Submit the form with a test entry and confirm it arrives in your CRM.
- Check that the thank-you page loads and fires its tracking.
- Click every link and button.
- Open the page in a private window to see what a new visitor sees, including the cookie banner.
- Run the page through PageSpeed Insights and compare with last month. For fixes, use Improve page speed and mobile experience.
A form that has been broken since the last site update is the most expensive thing you will find.
Step 5: Check that the content is still true
Read the page as a stranger. Are the customer logos and quotes current? Does the offer still exist, with the right dates? Do any numbers, features or team names need updating? Stale pages make a company look careless.
Step 6: Rank the findings and fix three
Put every finding on a list with two scores: how much it hurts conversion and how long it takes to fix. Fix the three with the highest impact first, then move the rest to next month. Trying to fix everything means nothing gets finished.
Step 7: Log it
Keep one row per finding in a sheet: date, page, finding, change made and the result a month later. After a quarter you can see which fixes paid off and whether your guesses about impact are any good. When you want to test a bigger change, use Test systematically and apply learnings.
Common mistakes
- Looking only at the numbers and never at real sessions.
- Skipping the form test because it worked last time.
- Making ten changes at once and being unable to tell which one worked.
- Auditing pages that have almost no traffic.
- Doing the audit when it feels convenient, which means rarely.
How you know it works
No page has a broken form or a stale offer for more than a month. Each audit leaves behind a short list of changes and a log of results. Conversion rate on your top pages holds steady or rises, and you can explain every movement.
