Foundry North Technical SEO & performance · Leeds
Example document · fictional client · all findings invented
Audit · FN-2026-31

Website Audit

Prepared for Weld & Flax, homeware · August 2026

URLs crawled412
Tested19 August 2026
Lead auditorR. Osei
Findings6 (1 critical)
Performance
58/100
SEO
71/100
Accessibility
82/100
Best practices
76/100

Scope & method

We crawled 412 URLs, ran lab tests on a throttled mid-range Android over simulated 4G, and read twelve months of Search Console data. Scores follow Lighthouse conventions. Findings are ordered by what they cost the business, not by category.

Findings

WF-01

The staging site is indexed, and canonicals point at it

Critical

Google holds both copies of the site, and around sixty product pages already resolve their canonical to the staging subdomain. Left alone, this erodes the live domain's rankings page by page.

FixPut staging behind authentication, correct the canonical tags to the live domain, and resubmit the sitemap. Half a day of work.

WF-02

Mobile LCP is 4.8 s on product pages

High

Hero images ship at original size, the largest at 1.9 MB. Product pages are where purchase decisions happen, and they are the slowest pages on the site.

FixResponsive srcset with AVIF, preload the hero, lazy-load below the fold. Target is under 2.5 s.

WF-03

1,240 visits a month land on 404 pages

High

URLs under the retired /shop/ path still rank and are linked from two press features. Every one of those visits currently dead-ends.

FixApply the 68-rule redirect map drafted in the appendix. An afternoon, mostly testing.

WF-04

Product schema omits price and availability

Medium

Listings are not eligible for rich results, so competitors' results show prices and stock where yours show a bare link.

FixExtend the JSON-LD template with offers, then validate in Search Console.

WF-05

Sale badges and footer links fail WCAG AA contrast

Medium

The badge text measures 2.6:1 against its background; AA requires 4.5:1. This is a token change, not a redesign.

FixDarken the two colour tokens and re-run the automated checks.

WF-06

No touch icon or web manifest

Low

Bookmarks and share sheets fall back to a screenshot instead of the brand mark.

FixAdd the icon set and a minimal manifest. An hour.

First 30 days

  1. WF-01 this week. The deindexing risk compounds while staging stays visible.
  2. WF-03 next. The redirect map is drafted; it returns real traffic for an afternoon's work.
  3. WF-02 as one sprint. The image pipeline is the whole performance story on mobile.

Fix those three and the picture changes: we estimate performance moves into the high 80s and the 404 traffic returns to product pages. The rest fits inside a normal sprint.

Prepared for Weld & Flax Ltd. This is a fictional example document; the client, the findings, and every figure are invented.

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