Your site has errors. You just do not know which ones, or which one is costing you traffic. Here is how to find them with an audit tool, what each error actually means, and the fix for each one.
Quick Answer
Run a website audit, work through the failed checks in priority order, fix one group of errors at a time, and re-run the audit after each round. Most sites have the same handful of problems: broken links, missing meta descriptions, slow pages, missing alt text, mixed content, and pages Google cannot reach. None of them need guesswork. An audit names the exact page, the exact check that failed, and the order to fix them in.
Start with one audit, not a list of hunches
Open the free website audit tool, enter your homepage URL, and run it. The scan takes about a minute and covers up to five pages per run. Start with the homepage and your most important landing page. If those two are clean, the rest of the site usually follows. If they are not, you have found your work for the week.
Read the failed checks first, in the order the report lists them. The report already sorts by priority, critical, high, medium, low. That order is the plan. Do not start with the easy fixes at the bottom and leave the critical ones at the top. Fix in the order given, then re-run the audit and watch the failures clear. That loop, scan, fix, re-scan, is the whole method.
Error 1: Broken links and 404 pages
How the audit surfaces it: the report lists every internal link that points to a page that no longer exists, with the exact URL that is broken and the page that links to it.
What it means: visitors hit a dead end, and search crawlers waste time on pages that go nowhere. A few broken links are normal after a redesign. Dozens of them usually mean old URLs were never redirected.
The fix: if the page moved, redirect the old URL to the new one. If the page is gone for good, remove the link or point it at a live page that covers the same topic. Then re-run the audit to confirm the list is empty. This is a ten minute job on most small sites, and it belongs at the top of the list.
Error 2: Missing or duplicate meta descriptions and titles
How the audit surfaces it: one failed check per page, naming the page and whether the title or description is missing, duplicated across pages, or too long to display.
What it means: Google often uses your meta description as the snippet in search results. Without one, it picks whatever text it wants from the page. Duplicate titles tell Google two different pages are the same page, so neither ranks as well as it should.
The fix: write one unique title per page, 50 to 60 characters, and one unique description per page, 120 to 158 characters, written for a human reader. Start with the pages that already get search traffic, then work through the rest. This is writing work, not technical work, and it is the fix most site owners skip. Do not skip it.
Error 3: Heading and structure errors
How the audit surfaces it: pages flagged for missing H1 tags, more than one H1, or headings that skip levels, for example an H3 straight after an H1.
What it means: headings are how both readers and crawlers understand what a page is about. One H1 that states the topic, followed by H2s and H3s in order, is the structure that works. A page with no H1, or three of them, reads as confused.
The fix: give every page exactly one H1. Then check the rest of the headings run in order. On most sites this is a find and replace job in the page editor, page by page, starting with the homepage.
Error 4: Slow pages, large images, and render blocking resources
How the audit surfaces it: failed checks for server response time, image size, missing image dimensions, and scripts or stylesheets that block the page from showing.
What it means: a slow page loses visitors before they read anything, and Google measures that. The usual causes are a 2MB hero image saved as a PNG, scripts that load before the page content, and a server that takes too long to answer at all.
The fix, in this order: first check server response time. If Time to First Byte is over 800 milliseconds, caching, a CDN, or better hosting is the fix, and no image work will make up for a slow server. Next, compress large images, convert them to WebP or AVIF, serve responsive sizes, and lazy load images below the fold. Then defer scripts that do not need to show the page, like analytics, chat widgets, and social feeds. Finally, declare width and height on images so the page does not jump as they load. Re-run the audit after each step. You will see which change actually moved the number.
Error 5: Mixed content and missing HTTPS
How the audit surfaces it: an HTTPS page flagged for loading an image, script, or stylesheet over plain HTTP, or a whole site flagged for not using HTTPS at all.
What it means: browsers mark plain HTTP pages as not secure, and visitors bounce. Mixed content looks broken to visitors even when the page itself works, because the browser blocks or warns on the insecure parts.
The fix: if the site is not on HTTPS yet, that is the single most important fix on the report. Get a certificate and redirect every HTTP URL to HTTPS. For mixed content, find the HTTP links in the report, change them to HTTPS, and check that any third party embeds you use also load over HTTPS. This is usually a search and replace job, not a rebuild.
Error 6: Pages Google cannot reach
How the audit surfaces it: failed checks for a robots.txt rule blocking pages you want indexed, a page accidentally set to noindex, a missing canonical tag, or a missing XML sitemap.
What it means: this is the silent error. Your site looks fine to you while Google is being told to stay out, or is never told the page exists. It often happens after a redesign or a staging site goes live with its staging settings still on.
The fix: check robots.txt first and remove any rule blocking pages you want found. Remove accidental noindex tags. Add a canonical tag to every page, especially filtered or paginated ones. Then make a sitemap that lists every page and submit it in Search Console. If you need one quickly, the free XML Sitemap Generator crawls up to 500 pages and hands you a valid file. After that, re-run the audit and confirm the crawl errors are gone.
Error 7: Missing alt text and thin content
How the audit surfaces it: images flagged without alt text, and pages flagged for content under 300 words.
What it means: alt text is how screen readers describe an image and how image search finds it. Missing it costs you both. Thin pages rarely rank for anything competitive, because there is not enough on the page to rank for.
The fix: add alt text to every image, describing what the image actually shows, not stuffing keywords into it. For thin pages, either expand the page with genuinely useful information or merge it into a stronger page on the same topic. Do not pad pages with filler to hit a word count. Write the missing information, or do not keep the page.
What to do when the report is mostly noise
Not every failed check deserves your afternoon. A missing theme color tag, a readability grade on technical documentation, a perfect speed score on a page nobody visits, these are polish. The signal is almost always the same: something blocking crawlers, something slowing the server, or something missing on the page itself. Fix those first, re-run the audit, and schedule the rest for later. The earlier articles in this series cover the same ground from two other angles: how to run the audit in the first place, and how to read the report section by section.
The weekly habit that keeps errors from coming back
Run the audit after every redesign, after any migration, whenever traffic dips unexpectedly, and once a quarter as a habit. Keep the old reports. A falling score between two clean quarters usually means a plugin update or a deploy changed something, and the new report will tell you exactly what changed. Errors do not stay fixed on their own. The sites that stay clean are the ones that check.
Run a free website audit on your homepage right now, work the failed checks top to bottom, and re-scan as you go. And if you want the full checklist behind this article, start with the website audit checklist and the rest of the free tools hub.
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