UX Audit Checklist: 15 Things We Check on Every Project

A UX audit is not a subjective critique of how a website looks. It is a systematic evaluation of how well a digital product serves its users and achieves its business objectives. We run a structured audit at the beginning of every redesign project, and the findings consistently challenge assumptions about what needs to change. Often, the pages that stakeholders want to redesign are not the ones causing the most user friction.

Our audit covers five core areas: navigation and information architecture, accessibility compliance, performance and loading behavior, mobile experience, and content hierarchy. Within navigation, we evaluate menu structure depth, labeling clarity, search functionality, and breadcrumb implementation. For accessibility, we test against WCAG 2.1 AA standards, including color contrast ratios, keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, focus management, and alt text coverage. These are not optional quality checks; they are fundamental requirements that affect both user experience and legal compliance.

Performance auditing goes beyond running a Lighthouse score. We test real-world loading behavior on throttled connections and mid-range devices. We measure time to interactive, largest contentful paint, and cumulative layout shift in actual usage conditions. We also audit third-party script impact, identifying which analytics tools, chat widgets, and marketing pixels are degrading performance. It is common to find that removing two or three unnecessary scripts improves load time by 40 percent or more.

The mobile audit is where we find the most critical issues. We test on actual devices rather than browser emulators, because touch target sizes, scroll behavior, and font rendering differ significantly between simulated and real mobile experiences. We evaluate form usability on mobile, check that interactive elements have adequate spacing for thumb navigation, and verify that no critical content is hidden behind hamburger menus that users rarely open. The content hierarchy review ensures that the most important information is visible without scrolling and that the visual weight of elements matches their business priority.