Your website is probably broken in at least three ways. Here is how to find out for free.

THIS WEEK: Most small business websites have problems the owner does not know about. Broken links sending visitors to error pages. Pages that take six seconds to load on mobile. Images that are the wrong size and dragging everything else down with them. None of this is visible to you when you look at your own site. This week we look at three free tools that find these problems in minutes, what to do with the results, and what to check first.

A slow, broken, or poorly optimised website costs you in two ways. The first is visitors: people who arrive on a page that loads slowly or throws an error leave immediately, and they do not come back. The second is rankings: Google uses page speed, Core Web Vitals, and overall technical health as ranking signals. A site with widespread technical problems is harder to rank regardless of how good the content is.

The frustrating thing is that most of these problems are invisible to the person running the website. You visit your own site regularly, you know where everything is, and your browser has cached most of it anyway so it loads fast for you. Meanwhile, a first-time visitor on a mobile connection is waiting six seconds for your homepage to appear and then hitting a broken link on your services page.

Google retired its standalone Mobile-Friendly Test tool in December 2023. The tool has been replaced by Lighthouse, which checks mobile usability as part of a broader audit covering performance, accessibility, and SEO. This is actually an improvement: you get significantly more information in one place. The three tools below give you a complete picture of your site's health without spending anything.

TOOL 1: Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights checks your site speed and Core Web Vitals. You enter your URL and it analyses your page using two data sources: real-world data from actual Chrome users visiting your site, and lab data generated by Lighthouse simulating how your page loads. The real-world data is what matters most for SEO purposes because it reflects actual user experience. It gives you scores for mobile and desktop separately, and flags specific issues: images that are too large, render-blocking scripts, unused CSS, and so on. The Core Web Vitals section is the most important part. Google uses three metrics to assess page experience: Largest Contentful Paint (how long before the main content appears), Cumulative Layout Shift (whether elements jump around while the page loads), and Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds when someone clicks or taps). Each is rated as Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor. If any of them are rated Poor, that is a ranking issue worth fixing. PageSpeed Insights was updated to Lighthouse 13 in October 2025, bringing more accurate performance scoring and better differentiation between lab and field data.

Link: https://pagespeed.web.dev

TOOL 2: Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider finds broken links and technical issues across your whole site. It is a desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that crawls your website the way Google does, following every link it finds and reporting back what it encounters. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs with no time limit and no sign-up required. For most small business websites that is more than sufficient. It finds broken links returning 404 errors, redirect chains, missing title tags, duplicate page titles, missing meta descriptions, pages blocked from being indexed, and images without alt text. You get a complete list of every issue with the source URL so you know exactly which page contains the problem and which page it links to. The paid licence is £199 per year and removes the 500 URL limit, but for a site under 500 pages the free version does the full job. Version 24, released in May 2026, added MCP integration so you can connect it to AI tools directly, though that is more relevant for agencies than small business owners doing their own audit.

Link: https://screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

TOOL 3: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools checks your site's overall SEO health including broken links, technical errors, and keyword performance. As covered in a previous issue, it is free for any site you verify ownership of and runs a site audit covering over 170 issues. It is worth including here because it combines broken link detection with broader SEO health monitoring and gives you a priority score for each issue so you know what to fix first. If you only want to install one tool, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools covers the most ground. If you want granular control over a technical crawl, Screaming Frog gives you more detail.

Link: https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools

This takes about twenty minutes and will tell you more about your website than most small business owners have ever known.

Start with Google PageSpeed Insights. Enter your homepage URL and run the test for mobile first. Look at the Core Web Vitals section. If Largest Contentful Paint is over 2.5 seconds, your page is loading too slowly for Google's threshold. The most common cause is images that are too large or not in a modern format. The tool will tell you specifically which images are the problem and how much file size you would save by converting them to WebP format.

Then download Screaming Frog and crawl your site. When it finishes, click on the Response Codes filter and select 4xx. Every URL in that list is a broken link on your site. Export the list, which includes both the broken URL and the page it appears on, and either fix or remove each one. Then check the Page Titles tab for any pages with missing or duplicated titles, and the Meta Description tab for pages with missing descriptions.

Between those two checks you will have found your site's most significant technical problems. Fix the broken links first because they actively send visitors to error pages. Then work through the speed issues. Then tackle the missing metadata.

NEED HELP? In over your head? Wearing too many hats already? No idea where to start? I can help you. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!

GTmetrix (gtmetrix.com) is a free speed testing tool that gives you a waterfall chart showing exactly how your page loads, which resources load first, which ones are blocking other resources, and how long each element takes. It is more detailed than PageSpeed Insights for diagnosing specific speed problems and particularly useful if PageSpeed Insights tells you your page is slow but you cannot identify why.

Google Search Console (search.google.com/search-console) remains the best source of data on how Google actually crawls and indexes your site. The Coverage report shows pages Google cannot index and why, the Core Web Vitals report shows which pages have speed issues based on real user data, and the Enhancements section flags structured data errors. If you have not set it up, do that before anything else.

Most small business owners treat their website as something that gets built once and then left alone. That is understandable. You are running a business, not a web development agency. But a website that was technically sound when it was built two years ago may have accumulated broken links as external sites have moved or closed, may be failing Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds as those thresholds have tightened, and may have images added by staff or a previous developer that are dragging the page load time down considerably.

None of the tools above require any technical knowledge to run. They tell you what is wrong in plain language and usually tell you how to fix it too. The broken links Screaming Frog finds can often be fixed in ten minutes. A slow page identified by PageSpeed Insights usually comes down to a handful of oversized images that can be compressed or converted to WebP in minutes using a free tool.

The websites that rank well and convert visitors are not always the most impressive looking. They are usually the ones that work properly. That is a lower bar than most people think, and the gap between where most small business sites are and where they need to be is often a single afternoon of fixes.

Got a tool you want me to review? Reply to this email. Need actual help with your business's systems or digital setup? I have been doing this for 17 years. Get in touch. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!