How to price a website audit, or give it away

Every freelance web designer and small agency ends up running some kind of website audit sooner or later, whether that is a quick look before a pitch or a proper report handed over as a piece of work in its own right. The question that keeps coming back is whether to charge for it. Give an audit away too often and it starts eating hours you cannot recover. Charge for every audit and you can lose prospects who would have become good clients if you had let them see your work first. Working out how to price a website audit, or whether to price it at all, comes down to what the audit is actually for in each case.

When an audit is worth giving away

If the audit exists to open a conversation with one specific prospect, it should almost always be free. The value is not the report itself, it is the door it opens: a business owner who reads three or four specific, checkable findings about their own site is far more likely to take a call than one who receives a generic pitch. That is the reasoning behind treating a website audit as a sales tool rather than a paid product, and it holds up well in practice. Charging upfront for something meant to start a relationship usually kills the relationship before it starts, because you are asking a stranger to pay before they have any reason to trust you.

When it is worth charging

Charging makes more sense once the audit stops being a way in and becomes a distinct request. An existing client who wants you to look over a competitor's site before a rebrand, an agency asked to check a franchise network's local pages against each other, or a business owner who approaches you cold wanting an honest opinion on their site without committing to a redesign: in each of those cases the audit itself becomes a paid service, not a lead-in to one. There is no relationship to protect by giving the work away, and doing it for free just trains people to expect a full report for nothing.

Working out a fair price

Ignore any claim about a standard rate for a website audit, there is not one that means much across different markets and different depths of report. Build the number from your own time instead. Estimate honestly how long a proper audit actually takes: checking speed and mobile behaviour, looking at SSL and basic security, reading the content for accuracy, and writing up findings in language a non-technical owner can act on, then add time for a short call to talk through the results. Multiply that by your day rate or hourly rate and you have a starting figure. An audit that genuinely needs half a day of focused work should be priced like half a day of focused work, not knocked down because it is “just an audit”.

Fix the scope before you fix the price. Decide in advance what is covered, for instance a defined list of technical, content and conversion checks, rather than agreeing to look at everything a client can think of, because open-ended briefs are exactly how scope creep in web design works its way into what was meant to be a fixed, contained job.

What makes a paid audit worth the invoice

A client who pays for an audit should get something that stands on its own, whether or not they ever hire you for the fixes. That means a written report, not a verbal summary, with findings ranked by how much they actually matter rather than listed in the order you happened to check them. Working from a structured checklist keeps a report consistent from one client to the next, which matters more once you are running these regularly. It also means no thinly disguised sales pitch inside a paid deliverable: if a client suspects the recommendations exist mainly to justify a follow-up quote from you, the trust the report was supposed to build starts working the other way.

Where automation changes the maths

Most of the time in a website audit goes on the technical half: checking speed, mobile rendering, SSL, working out what the site is built on, and cross-checking the business against a register like Companies House. When Patchscout runs a search, it does that technical crawl and enrichment automatically as part of scoring the prospect, attaching the speed, mobile, SSL and site builder findings alongside the Companies House record. That does not replace the judgement and the write-up that make a paid audit worth paying for, but it removes the slowest, most repeatable part of assembling one, which changes how long a proper audit actually takes to produce.

If you want to see what that combined audit looks like before you decide how to price your own, the three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to run one against a trade and town you already know.