Something's not right with your website. A UX audit tells you what.
Traffic's fine, enquiries aren't, and the site feels a bit tired. We'll find out why, in plain English, and hand you a prioritised list you can act on.
For Marketing Leads and Business Owners Who Suspect Something's Off
You don't need the right words for the problem. That's our job.
Maybe your site hasn't been touched in years. Maybe it's busy but the phone stays quiet. Maybe a redesign's on the cards and you want to know what to fix first, or you've inherited a site from another agency and nobody left the manual.
Our ux audit looks at your site the way your visitors do: journeys, analytics, accessibility, mobile and messaging. You get a written report and a walkthrough call, and the findings are yours to take wherever you like.
Why Teams come to us?
“Our enquiries have dropped and we don't know why.”
We follow real journeys from landing page to enquiry form and look at where people actually leave. You get evidence, not a hunch dressed up as a finding.
“Something's wrong but we can't put our finger on it.”
That feeling is usually right. The audit gives it a name and the evidence behind it, so you can explain it to your team or your board without guessing.
“We're worried about accessibility and the EAA 2025 changes.”
Accessibility is checked as standard against WCAG 2.2 AA, and we'll tell you plainly whether the European Accessibility Act affects you. It's never an add-on.
“e don't want a redesign, just to fix what's broken.”
Good, because the report is a prioritised list of fixes, most useful first. Nobody's quietly steering you towards a rebuild, and plenty of sites don't need one.
The Gecko Way™
Our approach to successful projects
Before we look at a single page, we want to hear the doubt in your own words. What made you start wondering? Enquiries tailing off, a board member saying the site "looks old", a redesign quote you're not sure you believe? We'll ask who your visitors are, what you want them to do, and which pages matter most to the business. Then we get access to whatever you've got: analytics, Search Console, any heatmaps or past research. If your tracking's patchy or you don't trust it, that's fine. Plenty of people don't, and it's one of the first things we'll tell you about. Any user feedback you've collected, even a handful of grumpy emails, is gold at this stage.
This is the bit where we use your site like a customer would, which is less glamorous than it sounds. We walk the main journeys from homepage to enquiry, on a laptop and on a phone, and note every moment of hesitation. We check the analytics against what we saw, so a hunch about the contact page either stands up or gets dropped. Accessibility gets tested properly, with a keyboard, a screen reader and colour contrast checks, rather than a quick automated scan and a green tick. And we read your copy asking one plain question: is it obvious what you want me to do next?
Findings are only useful if someone can act on them, so the report is written for the people who'll read it, not for other UX designers. Every issue comes with what we found, why it matters to your visitors, and what we'd do about it. Then we sort the lot by impact and effort, so the quick wins sit at the top and the bigger jobs are clearly marked as bigger jobs. Screenshots show exactly where each problem is. Nothing is padded out to look thorough, and if a page is working well, we'll say so and leave it alone. It's written for your site specifically, rather than filled in from a generic UX audit template.
We don't email a PDF and disappear. We book a walkthrough call and go through the findings together, with whoever needs to be there: you, your team, the person who'll be doing the fixes, even a sceptical director if that helps. You can ask the daft questions (we'd much rather you did), push back on anything that doesn't fit how your organisation works, and leave knowing why each recommendation is on the list. If you need to make the case for budget afterwards, you'll have the evidence, the screenshots and the language to do it without us in the room. Nobody on your side needs to be a UX expert to follow it.
The report is yours. That's the whole point of it. Hand it to your in-house developer, your current agency, a freelancer you trust or us, and it'll make sense to all of them because it's written plainly and prioritised clearly. We won't hold anything back to keep you hooked, and there's no small print tying the audit to future work. If you do want a hand with the fixes later, we'd be glad to help, but plenty of people take the list and get on with it themselves. Honestly, that's a good result for everyone too.
What's Included in a UX Audit
User Journeys & Analytics
We start with the journeys that matter most to your organisation, usually from the homepage or a key landing page through to an enquiry, a booking, a donation or a sale. We click through each one ourselves and note where things slow down, confuse or simply stop.
Then we check that against your analytics to see where real visitors drop off, which pages they skip and which ones they bounce straight off. Putting the two together is where the useful findings come from.
A form that looks fine on paper but loses half its visitors at the postcode field is exactly the sort of thing this turns up. Think of it as walking your conversion funnel step by step, with a close eye on the bounce rate of your key landing pages.
Accessibility Review
Accessibility is part of every audit we do, not something you have to ask for separately. We review your key pages against WCAG 2.2 at AA level, the benchmark most UK organisations work to, testing with a keyboard and a screen reader as well as automated tools. That catches the things a scan misses, like a menu you can't close without a mouse or a button that just reads out "click here".
If you sell to customers in the EU, we'll also tell you whether the European Accessibility Act applies to you. People often go looking for web accessibility services as a separate project, but many of the fixes overlap with good UX, so it's worth seeing them side by side.
Mobile & Responsive Experience
For a lot of sites, most visitors arrive on a phone, and your analytics will tell us whether that's true for you. We test the key journeys on real phones and tablets, not just a shrunken desktop window. That's where the small irritations show up: buttons too close together, a menu that covers half the screen, forms that summon the wrong keyboard, images that take an age to load on 4G.
None of these look dramatic in a design file. Any of them can cost you enquiries from people who were ready to get in touch and gave up with their thumb hovering over the back button. If your navigation hides behind a hamburger menu, we'll check people can actually find it and use it.
Content & Messaging
Plenty of sites have a design problem that's really a words problem. We read your key pages as a first-time visitor would, someone who doesn't know your organisation, your services or your internal jargon. Is it clear within a few seconds what you do and who it's for? Does each page have one obvious next step, or five competing ones?
Are your buttons and links saying something useful, or just "find out more"? We'll point out where the messaging is doing its job, where it's burying the good stuff, and where a simple rewrite would probably do more than any design change. We'll also look at page structure and visual hierarchy, which is designer-speak for whether the most important thing on each page is also the most noticeable.
Sector & Competitor Benchmarking
Your visitors don't see your site in isolation. They've often looked at a few others before landing on yours, whether that's a competitor, a similar charity or another firm in your field. Where it's useful, we'll look at a handful of those sites alongside yours and compare the things that matter to a visitor: how quickly they get to the point, how easy they make it to get in touch, and how they show they can be trusted, through reviews, accreditations or case studies.
The aim is to see where you're ahead, where you're behind and what your visitors have come to expect, rather than to copy anyone. It's a light-touch competitor analysis, focused on how clearly each site sets out its value proposition and how much social proof it puts in front of visitors.
Your Report & Walkthrough Call
Everything we find ends up in one written report, in plain English, with screenshots showing exactly where each issue sits. Each recommendation is scored by how much difference it's likely to make and how much work it'll take, so you can see at a glance what to tackle this month and what can wait for next year's budget.
Then we go through it with you on a walkthrough call, answer your questions and talk through anything that isn't clear. The report is yours to keep and use however you like, with your own team, your current agency, a freelancer, or with us if you'd prefer. Issue prioritisation like this turns a long list of problems into a fix roadmap you can work through at your own pace.
What's Included in a UX Audit
User Journeys & Analytics
We start with the journeys that matter most to your organisation, usually from the homepage or a key landing page through to an enquiry, a booking, a donation or a sale. We click through each one ourselves and note where things slow down, confuse or simply stop.
Then we check that against your analytics to see where real visitors drop off, which pages they skip and which ones they bounce straight off. Putting the two together is where the useful findings come from.
A form that looks fine on paper but loses half its visitors at the postcode field is exactly the sort of thing this turns up. Think of it as walking your conversion funnel step by step, with a close eye on the bounce rate of your key landing pages.
Accessibility Review
Accessibility is part of every audit we do, not something you have to ask for separately. We review your key pages against WCAG 2.2 at AA level, the benchmark most UK organisations work to, testing with a keyboard and a screen reader as well as automated tools. That catches the things a scan misses, like a menu you can't close without a mouse or a button that just reads out "click here".
If you sell to customers in the EU, we'll also tell you whether the European Accessibility Act applies to you. People often go looking for web accessibility services as a separate project, but many of the fixes overlap with good UX, so it's worth seeing them side by side.
Mobile & Responsive Experience
For a lot of sites, most visitors arrive on a phone, and your analytics will tell us whether that's true for you. We test the key journeys on real phones and tablets, not just a shrunken desktop window. That's where the small irritations show up: buttons too close together, a menu that covers half the screen, forms that summon the wrong keyboard, images that take an age to load on 4G.
None of these look dramatic in a design file. Any of them can cost you enquiries from people who were ready to get in touch and gave up with their thumb hovering over the back button. If your navigation hides behind a hamburger menu, we'll check people can actually find it and use it.
Content & Messaging
Plenty of sites have a design problem that's really a words problem. We read your key pages as a first-time visitor would, someone who doesn't know your organisation, your services or your internal jargon. Is it clear within a few seconds what you do and who it's for? Does each page have one obvious next step, or five competing ones?
Are your buttons and links saying something useful, or just "find out more"? We'll point out where the messaging is doing its job, where it's burying the good stuff, and where a simple rewrite would probably do more than any design change. We'll also look at page structure and visual hierarchy, which is designer-speak for whether the most important thing on each page is also the most noticeable.
Sector & Competitor Benchmarking
Your visitors don't see your site in isolation. They've often looked at a few others before landing on yours, whether that's a competitor, a similar charity or another firm in your field. Where it's useful, we'll look at a handful of those sites alongside yours and compare the things that matter to a visitor: how quickly they get to the point, how easy they make it to get in touch, and how they show they can be trusted, through reviews, accreditations or case studies.
The aim is to see where you're ahead, where you're behind and what your visitors have come to expect, rather than to copy anyone. It's a light-touch competitor analysis, focused on how clearly each site sets out its value proposition and how much social proof it puts in front of visitors.
Your Report & Walkthrough Call
Everything we find ends up in one written report, in plain English, with screenshots showing exactly where each issue sits. Each recommendation is scored by how much difference it's likely to make and how much work it'll take, so you can see at a glance what to tackle this month and what can wait for next year's budget.
Then we go through it with you on a walkthrough call, answer your questions and talk through anything that isn't clear. The report is yours to keep and use however you like, with your own team, your current agency, a freelancer, or with us if you'd prefer. Issue prioritisation like this turns a long list of problems into a fix roadmap you can work through at your own pace.
"I try your enquiry form on my phone like a customer would, and where I get stuck is usually where we find your missing leads."
Mark Whitworth, UX Designer at Gecko
UX Audit Case Study
[CASE STUDY PLACEHOLDER: words describing a real UX audit project. Client/sector, the doubt they came in with, what the audit found, and what changed once the recommendations were acted on. Do not publish until real project details are confirmed.]
Key metric: [METRIC PLACEHOLDER, e.g. change in enquiry form completions]
UX stands for user experience, and a UX audit is a structured look at how easy your website is to use from the point of view of the people visiting it. We check whether visitors can find what they came for, understand what you offer and get in touch without friction, then back that up with the evidence in your analytics. You probably need one if enquiries don't match your traffic, if the site hasn't been properly reviewed in a few years, if you're planning a redesign and want to know what's actually broken first, or if you've inherited a site and don't know where the problems are. A nagging feeling that something's off is a perfectly good reason too. Those feelings are usually right. You might also hear it called a website UX review, which is the same thing. If your conversion rate has slipped and nobody can explain why, that's exactly the question an audit is built to answer. Every finding is tied back to your organisational goals, whether that's enquiries, bookings or donations.
Most audits take [X to X weeks] from kick-off to walkthrough call, depending on the size of the site and how many journeys we're reviewing. A small site with one main enquiry route is quicker than a larger one with bookings, donations and several audiences. The biggest variable is usually access. Once we can get into your analytics and any other data you have, things move quickly. We'll give you a firm timeline before we start, and we'll stick to it. Part of that time goes on a heuristic review, where we check each key page against established usability standards, the rules of thumb that make a site easy to use.
It'll tell you a lot. Every audit includes an accessibility review of your key pages against WCAG 2.2 AA, using manual checks with a keyboard and screen reader as well as automated tools, and you'll get a clear list of what fails, why it matters and how to fix it. What it won't give you is a line-by-line review of every page on a large site, or a formal compliance certificate. If you need that level of cover, for example because you're a public sector body or the European Accessibility Act applies to the services you sell into the EU, we'll say so in the report and talk you through what a fuller accessibility review would involve. An automated accessibility checker is a useful first pass, but it can't judge accessibility compliance on its own, because plenty of problems only show up when a person tries the page with assistive technology.
Not necessarily, and often not at all. The point of the audit is to find out what's actually wrong, and very often the answer is a set of specific fixes: a simpler form, clearer navigation, better copy on three key pages, a handful of accessibility issues. Those can usually be done on your existing site. Sometimes the report does show that the problems run deeper, for example when the site's structure or platform is holding everything back, and in that case we'll tell you plainly. Either way, you'll have the evidence to make that call yourself rather than taking an agency's word for it, ours included. Clearer calls to action alone can make a noticeable difference to conversion rates. And where a problem lives in one of your page templates, fixing it once fixes it on every page that uses it.
It depends mostly on the size of your site and how many journeys we review. As a guide, audits start from [£X], and we'll give you a fixed price before any work begins. That number won't move once it's agreed. If we spot something outside the scope halfway through, we'll tell you and let you decide what to do about it, rather than quietly adding it to the invoice. And if there's a budget ceiling you need to stay under, tell us at the start and we'll shape the audit to fit. The price covers the full audit, including the recommendations report and the walkthrough call.
That's entirely up to you. The report is written so anyone can pick it up and act on it, whether that's your in-house team, your current agency or a freelancer, and plenty of people do exactly that. If you'd like us to help with some or all of the fixes, we can, from quick content and accessibility changes through to bigger design and development work. We'll quote for that separately, so there's no obligation baked into the audit. And if you'd simply like to come back in a year and see how things have moved on, we'd be glad to do that too. Got a question we haven't covered? Get in touch and we'll give you a straight answer.
Yes, and it makes no difference to the audit. We look at your site from the visitor's side, so it doesn't matter whether it runs on Umbraco, another CMS or something custom, or whether it was built by us, another agency or a freelancer who's since moved on. If you've inherited the site and nobody left notes on how it was put together, the report can be a useful starting point for getting to know it. Where a finding does depend on the platform, say a form that's awkward to change in your current CMS, we'll mention it so whoever picks up the fixes knows what they're dealing with. We'll be honest about technical feasibility too, because a recommendation your technology stack can't support isn't much use to anyone.
They overlap, but they answer different questions. An SEO audit looks at how easily people find you in search results. A technical health check looks at what's going on under the bonnet, things like security, updates, performance and code. A UX audit looks at what happens once someone lands on your site: whether they can understand it, use it and do the thing you want them to do. If your traffic's healthy but enquiries aren't, a UX audit is usually the right place to start. If nobody's finding you in the first place, an SEO audit probably is. Not sure which fits? Tell us what's worrying you and we'll point you to the right one. Page speed sits on the border between the two. We'll check your Core Web Vitals in Google's PageSpeed Insights, because slow pages drag down conversion rates, but the deeper technical fixes belong to a health check. And if you've been quoted for a "website audit", it's worth asking which of these it actually covers.
Got a nagging feeling about your website? Let's talk it through for free.
Book a free 30-minute call and tell us what's bothering you, whether it's a quiet enquiry form, a site that feels dated or a redesign quote you're not sure about. We'll ask a few questions, have a quick look at your site while we chat, and tell you honestly whether a UX audit is the right next step. If it isn't, we'll say so and point you somewhere more useful. You'll leave with a clearer idea of what's going on either way, and no obligation to do anything with it.
