Website audit for Swiss companies.

A website audit reviews six areas in a fixed order, because each area builds on the one before: reachability, load time, accessibility, legal pages, content and conversion. A page that never loads or never gets indexed does not need to be judged on its content. That is why technology comes first and not last.

• Technology and reachability. Status codes across every relevant URL, redirect chains, HTTPS and certificate validity, robots.txt, XML sitemap, canonical tags, status codes for pages that no longer exist, behaviour with JavaScript disabled, and the question of whether content is produced on the server or only in the browser.
• Load time and stability. The three field values Google uses to measure the user experience: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 — each at the 75th percentile of real visits over a rolling 28-day window. Alongside those: image formats and sizes, font loading, blocking scripts, and which external services are slowing the page down. What the three figures mean individually is set out in our glossary entry on Core Web Vitals.
• Accessibility. Contrast ratios, operation without a mouse, labelling of form fields, meaningful alternative text, a correct heading hierarchy, focus visibility, and the use of semantic elements instead of styled div containers.
• Legal pages and data protection. Completeness of the imprint details, presence and currency of the privacy policy, handling of cookies and trackers, embedded third-party services, and the question of whether anybody knows which data flows to whom.
• Content. Does the website cover the questions your customers actually ask? Are there pages serving the same topic twice? Do the most important pages answer their core question in the opening sentences — the precondition for a passage being quoted in an AI answer?
• Conversion barriers. The path from landing to enquiry, step by step: how many clicks to contact, how many mandatory fields in the form, is there a confirmation after sending, does the sending work at all, is a phone number tappable on a mobile, and what happens when something goes wrong.

The last point is the one automated tools never capture. A form that has delivered no email since the last server move shows green in every report: it loads fast, it is accessible, it is indexed. It just does not work. On every website we review we send at least one real test enquiry and follow where it arrives.

The three formats answer three different questions. The free SEO check answers "is a review worth it at all". The SEO analysis answers "why are we not being found". The website audit answers "what is in order on this website overall and what is not".

In practice: if your problem is "we sit on page three for our most important search terms", you need neither an accessibility review nor a read-through of the privacy policy. You need the SEO analysis. If your problem is instead "we have visitors but hardly any enquiries", or "we do not know what state this website is actually in", the narrow view falls short. Then the audit is the right format, because the cause can just as easily be a broken form, an unreadable font size on a phone or a missing price range as anything in the search engine.

Both paid formats share the same entry point: the free SEO check. It costs you nothing and us little, and in a good share of cases it makes clear afterwards that a paid engagement is not worth it. We say so when that is the answer. An agency that responds to every enquiry with the same large package is selling utilisation, not diagnosis.

An audit runs in five steps and takes your time only at the first and the last. The rest happens with us.

• 1. Goal setting (30 minutes). What should the website achieve, what counts as a good enquiry, and what has happened in the last twelve months — relaunch, server move, a change of who edits the content. Without that half hour, an audit judges symptoms with no yardstick.
• 2. Access. We need read access to Google Search Console and Analytics and, where one exists, to the content management system. If that access is missing, that is already the first finding. A website whose measurement data is available to nobody inside the company is being administered, not steered.
• 3. Data collection. A full crawl of every reachable page, a comparison against what is actually in the index, field values for load time, manual review of the twenty most important pages on several devices, and form and accessibility tests done by hand.
• 4. Report. Every finding with its location, the evidence, the expected effect, an effort estimate and an owner. Sorted not by review area but by the ratio of effect to effort — the list opens with what can be fixed in an hour and changes something you can feel.
• 5. Discussion (60 to 90 minutes). We walk the report through with you, take your objections on board, and set out what will actually happen in the next three months. After that the report is yours, raw data included.

Two to three weeks sounds long for a review that is technically done in a few days. The reason is data quality. The field values for load time represent a rolling 28-day window, and anomalies in Search Console can only be told apart from normal noise over several weeks. Anyone delivering faster is delivering lab measurements and calling them reality.

A website audit at DLM Digital starts at CHF 1,500. That covers a single-language company website with up to roughly fifty relevant pages, report and closing discussion included. Four factors move the figure upwards, and all four can be named in advance.

• Language versions. Every additional language means not only more text but a separate set of technical paths to check: language markup, hreflang relationships, redirect logic, its own legal pages.
• Shop and product data. Category pages, filter combinations and product variants normally generate a multiple of the visible URLs. That is exactly where the single most common technical finding appears: thousands of reachable addresses of which only a fraction belong in the index.
• Protected areas. A login, customer portal or booking flow cannot be crawled. It has to be walked through by hand, with test credentials, once per role.
• Several domains or subdomains. Every independent domain is technically its own website and is reviewed as one.

What does not determine the price: the size of your company and the size of your marketing budget. We bill by review effort, not by willingness to pay. What an ongoing engagement costs afterwards is set out openly on our page on SEO costs in Switzerland. If a rebuild rather than a repair is due, the ranges for that sit under Web design Switzerland.

We review three legally relevant areas and name the gaps — as findings, not as legal advice. That is not lawyerly caution but an honest split of roles. We can see what is missing; whether a particular wording is sufficient in a specific case is for a lawyer to decide.

Imprint details. Unlike Germany, Switzerland has no general imprint duty for every website. But anyone offering goods, works or services commercially in electronic business must, under Art. 3 para. 1 lit. s of the Federal Act against Unfair Competition, state identity and contact address clearly and in full, including an email address. For legal entities the identity is the company name entered in the commercial register, not the marketing name. The most common finding in this category is banal and still widespread: a company name on the website that differs from the registered one, or an imprint without a postcode.

Privacy policy. Since the revised Data Protection Act came into force on 1 September 2023, it must be transparent which personal data is processed for which purpose and who it is passed on to. Swiss law requires no EU-style consent for cookies; the duty to inform applies regardless. Anyone using a policy copied from Germany has usually cited the wrong statute and at the same time failed to list the embedded services in full. If the offering also addresses people in the EU, the GDPR applies on top, with its stricter requirements.

Accessibility. The benchmark is WCAG 2.2 at level AA, made concrete in Switzerland by the eCH-0059 standard. So far the duty binds the federal government, the cantons and the municipalities. The partial revision of the Disability Discrimination Act, for which the Federal Council passed its dispatch to Parliament in autumn 2025, would extend that duty for the first time to private providers of publicly accessible services; entry into force is expected in 2027 at the earliest, and only what Parliament decides is binding. Anyone offering goods or services in the EU has been covered by the European Accessibility Act since June 2025. Regardless of the legal position: most findings in this area — missing form labels, insufficient contrast, menus that cannot be operated by keyboard — are fixed in a few hours and improve usability for everyone. Our guide to accessible web design covers it in more detail.

After the audit you have a prioritised list — and not yet a better website. The value only appears in the implementation, which is why the question of who does it belongs in the closing discussion and not in a sales call afterwards.

Three routes are common. First: your internal team or your existing agency works through the list. The report is written for exactly that, with an owner and an effort estimate per point. Second: we take on the technical implementation as a bounded fixed-price project — sensible for findings that reach deep into code and rendering. Third: ongoing SEO support follows, in which the list is worked through over several months while measurement continues.

What we recommend in all three cases: a re-measurement after three to four months, taken on the same figures as the audit. Without that repetition it stays open whether the actions worked or the market simply moved. If a larger rebuild is coming anyway, the audit belongs before the rebuild and not after it — the points listed in our relaunch checklist are cheap beforehand and expensive afterwards.

An audit is the wrong spend as soon as it is foreseeable that the findings will sit untouched. We say so in the first conversation, even when it argues against the engagement. An unworked report is the worst outcome for both sides.

• No implementation budget. Spending CHF 1,500 on the diagnosis and nothing on the treatment buys an expensive confirmation that something is wrong. The money is then better placed in the first action than in the report about it.
• No access to the website. If nobody in the company can make changes and the previous supplier can no longer be reached, the first action is to get the access credentials back. That is not an audit topic, it is a precondition.
• A relaunch is already decided. If the rebuild is fixed for the coming months, we will not review the old website for contrast and load times. What makes sense then is a lean inventory of what has to be carried over into the new site: ranking URLs, a redirect plan, content that works.
• The website has been online only a few weeks. Field values for load time and Search Console data need usage. Without that basis, all that remains of the audit is the technical checklist — and the free check already covers most of it.
• The problem is known. If you already know the website is unusable on a phone and nobody has touched the content in four years, an audit confirms that for a fee. Start instead with what you already know.

If a question stays open, the way to answer it is free. The SEO check gives a first assessment, and the project calculator puts a range on a rebuild in a few minutes.