Site audits crawl your website to identify technical SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, and optimization opportunities.
Site audits crawl your website to identify technical SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, and optimization opportunities. NitroShock's Site Audit feature performs 50+ automated checks on each page, categorizing issues by severity so you can prioritize fixes that have the biggest impact on your search rankings.
Whether you're managing a single WordPress site or dozens of client projects, understanding what site audits reveal—and how to act on that data—is essential for maintaining healthy, search-friendly websites.
A site audit is a comprehensive analysis of your website's technical health from an SEO perspective. Think of it as a diagnostic scan that examines every accessible page on your site, looking for issues that could prevent search engines from properly crawling, indexing, and ranking your content.
When you run a site audit in NitroShock, the system crawls your website much like a search engine bot would. It follows internal links, analyzes page structure, checks response codes, evaluates metadata, and measures performance metrics. The result is a detailed report highlighting everything from critical errors that block indexing to minor optimizations that could improve user experience.
NitroShock integrates directly with your WordPress site, giving it deeper access than external audit tools. When you initiate an audit from the Site Audit tab within your project dashboard, you can choose between:
Single Page Audit: Analyzes one specific URL in depth. Ideal for checking individual pages after making changes or before publishing new content.
Full Site Crawl: Discovers and audits all accessible pages on your domain. Best for comprehensive site-wide analysis and identifying systemic issues.
Each page audited uses credits, with the exact cost shown before you confirm. For large sites, you can limit crawl depth or specify which sections to audit, giving you control over credit usage while still getting the insights you need.
The audit engine integrates Lighthouse technology for Core Web Vitals measurement, ensuring you get the same performance data Google uses to evaluate your site. Results are organized into four main categories: Performance, SEO, Accessibility, and Best Practices.
NitroShock's Site Audit examines over 50 different technical SEO factors across every page it crawls. Understanding what gets checked helps you interpret results and prioritize fixes.
The SEO category focuses on elements that directly impact search visibility:
Performance directly affects both user experience and search rankings. The audit measures:
Technical checks ensure search engines can properly access and understand your site:
Accessibility improvements help both users and search engines:
Regular site audits are fundamental to maintaining and improving your search performance. Here's why they should be a core part of your SEO workflow.
Search engines need to crawl, render, and understand your pages before they can rank them. A single technical issue—like a misconfigured robots.txt file or broken canonical tags—can prevent entire sections of your site from appearing in search results. Site audits catch these critical errors before they cost you traffic.
For example, if your audit reveals that important product pages return 404 errors, you can fix those broken links and restore access to valuable content. Or if duplicate title tags are confusing search engines about which page to rank, you can make each title unique and improve your visibility for multiple keywords.
Your competitors are either running regular audits or falling behind because they aren't. Sites with clean technical foundations consistently outperform those with unresolved issues. When search engines crawl your site efficiently, index your content correctly, and understand your page structure, you have a fundamental advantage in the rankings.
NitroShock's audit reports prioritize issues by severity—Critical, Warning, and Info—so you can focus on fixes that deliver the biggest impact. Resolving critical issues might immediately improve rankings, while addressing warnings and info items creates long-term competitive advantages.
Many technical SEO issues also harm user experience. Slow page speed frustrates visitors and increases bounce rates. Broken links create dead ends in your site navigation. Missing alt text makes content inaccessible to users with screen readers. Poor mobile responsiveness drives away the majority of web traffic.
By fixing issues identified in site audits, you simultaneously improve both search rankings and user satisfaction. This creates a positive feedback loop: better UX leads to better engagement metrics, which signals quality to search engines, which improves rankings, which brings more users.
NitroShock stores historical audit data, allowing you to track improvements over time. After implementing fixes, you can run another audit and compare results to measure progress. This historical tracking proves the value of your SEO efforts and helps identify new issues before they become serious problems.
For agencies managing client sites, this historical data becomes powerful reporting material. You can demonstrate tangible improvements in site health, showing exactly which issues were resolved and how technical SEO scores improved month over month.
The ideal audit frequency depends on your site's characteristics and how actively you're making changes.
High-Activity Sites: Run full audits weekly if you're publishing content daily, making frequent template changes, or running an e-commerce site with constantly updating inventory. Active development introduces new issues regularly, and weekly audits catch problems before they accumulate.
Moderate-Activity Sites: Bi-weekly or monthly audits work well for sites publishing content weekly or making occasional design updates. This frequency balances comprehensive monitoring with reasonable credit usage.
Low-Activity Sites: Quarterly audits are sufficient for relatively static sites that rarely change. However, run an immediate audit after any major updates, theme changes, or WordPress core updates.
After Major Changes: Always run an audit immediately after:
Rather than relying solely on scheduled audits, consider these trigger events:
Traffic Drops: If you notice sudden organic traffic decreases in your analytics, run an audit immediately to check for technical issues that might have appeared.
Ranking Declines: When your Rank Tracker shows significant position drops across multiple keywords, a site audit can reveal whether technical problems are causing the decline.
New Feature Launches: Before and after launching new site features, compare audit results to ensure the implementation didn't introduce issues.
Pre-Client Reporting: Before generating monthly client reports, run a fresh audit to include the latest site health data.
Since site audits use credits per page audited, you'll want to balance comprehensive coverage with budget efficiency:
For large sites, consider rotating focus areas. One month, crawl the entire site for a comprehensive baseline. The next month, audit only high-priority sections like top-performing pages or recently updated content. This approach maintains visibility into site health while managing credit usage.
Use single-page audits strategically. When optimizing specific high-value pages, run focused audits on those URLs rather than crawling the entire site. This is particularly effective for landing pages, cornerstone content, or pages you're actively trying to rank.
Navigate to your Site Audit tab and review the credit cost estimate before confirming each audit. NitroShock shows exactly how many pages will be crawled and the total credit cost, giving you transparency before committing to any action.
How long does a full site audit take?
Audit duration depends on your site size and server response times. Small sites with 50-100 pages typically complete in 2-5 minutes. Medium sites with several hundred pages might take 10-20 minutes. Large sites with thousands of pages can take an hour or more. NitroShock shows progress in real-time, and you can navigate away from the page—results will be waiting when you return.
Can I audit sites I don't own?
Yes, you can audit any publicly accessible website. This is useful for competitive analysis or when evaluating potential client sites during sales conversations. However, some sites may block crawlers, which could limit what data you can collect.
What's the difference between Site Audit and rank tracking?
Site Audit analyzes your website's technical health and on-page SEO factors—it looks at your site's code, structure, and implementation. Rank Tracker monitors where your site ranks in search results for specific keywords—it looks at your position in Google's search pages. Both are essential: Site Audit ensures your site is technically sound, while Rank Tracker measures whether those optimizations are improving your visibility.
Do I need to run audits on every project?
It depends on your goals. If you're actively optimizing a site for SEO, regular audits are essential for identifying issues and measuring improvements. For projects where you're only tracking rankings or researching keywords, you might skip site audits to conserve credits for other features.
How do I know which issues to fix first?
Start with items marked Critical—these typically represent serious problems that could prevent indexing or severely harm rankings. Next, address Warning level issues that have clear impact on important pages. Finally, work through Info items as optimization opportunities. The audit report categorizes and prioritizes everything for you.
Now that you understand how site audits work and why they matter, explore these related features:
Site audits form the foundation of effective technical SEO. By identifying and resolving issues systematically, you create the clean technical infrastructure search engines need to properly crawl, index, and rank your content.