What Is a UX Audit? What Ours Find on Real Sites
What a UX audit covers, what one costs, and the issues ours actually surface on live sites: real findings, the method behind them, and what got fixed.
Buy a UX audit when you need a prioritised fix list grounded in journeys, analytics and session evidence - not another moodboard. In the UK, a focused website UX audit typically costs around £1,500-£5,000; deeper product or multi-journey audits commonly sit £5,000-£15,000; lightweight heuristic reviews can start lower with freelancers. Those are market ranges, not a Code23 rate card. We scope a fixed fee against pages and journeys in scope, with fixed change scopes priced before work starts, and we pair human judgement with agent-assisted crawls so coverage is wider than a single afternoon of clicking.
What a UX audit is and what it covers
What is a UX audit?
A UX audit is an expert evaluation of usability and conversion friction on a live site or product, using heuristics, data and journey walkthroughs to produce ranked recommendations you can ship.
How much does a UX audit cost?
| Depth | Typical UK market range | What you usually get |
|---|---|---|
| Lightweight heuristic pass | £500-£2,000 | Checklist findings, short write-up |
| Focused website UX audit | £1,500-£5,000 | Key journeys, evidence pack, prioritised fixes |
| Product / multi-role audit | £5,000-£15,000 | Deeper flows, role matrices, stakeholder workshop |
| Audit + redesign Blueprint | Often folds into a wider band | Diagnostic that feeds a fixed rebuild quote |
How long does a UX audit take?
Most focused website audits complete in about 1-2 weeks of calendar time once access and analytics are available; deeper product audits often run 2-4 weeks including workshops and review.
What is included in a UX audit?
Expect journey maps of the money paths, heuristic and accessibility notes, analytics or session evidence where available, severity-rated findings, and a fix list ordered by impact versus effort - screenshots and short clips beat vague adjectives.
Price and book the entry offer through product design. Related money context when the audit says rebuild: website redesign cost.
Our method: heuristics, analytics, session evidence, agent-assisted crawls
We do not audit from taste alone. The stack:
- Heuristics. Clarity, consistency, error prevention, mobile affordances - classic usability lenses applied to your flows, not a generic template checklist pasted onto every client.
- Analytics. Where traffic enters, where it dies, device split, form starts vs completions. Without numbers, “the hero feels weak” is opinion.
- Session evidence. Watch real attempts when privacy allows. Rage clicks and looped form fields show up faster on video than in a slide.
- Agent-assisted crawls. Overnight agents walk charters across templates, broken states and accessibility smells - the pipeline behind AI agent QA - then humans triage severity and taste.
- Human sign-off. Agents expand coverage; they do not own release priority or brand judgement. That split matches how we think about AI and design in will AI replace UX designers.
Mastery is knowing which finding is a ship-this-week patch and which is a redesign trigger. Coverage without triage is noise.
What we actually found on real sites
We publish recurring patterns from live audits. Named percentages wait for client-approved disclosure.
Recurring issues our audits surface:
- Primary CTA fights the chrome. Navigation, chat widgets and cookie banners compete with the only action that pays the bills.
- Forms ask for biography. Optional fields marked required; mobile keyboards wrong for the data type; error messages that blame the user.
- Trust arrives too late. Proof, delivery expectations and pricing caveats sit below the fold on mobile after the form already lost the lead.
- Template IA. Marketing sites that mirror the org chart instead of the buyer’s job; related: when CRO hits a ceiling, see improve conversion rate.
- Accessibility debt. Contrast failures, missing labels, keyboard traps - often cheap to fix, expensive to ignore after a complaint.
- Performance as UX. Slow LCP on product templates feels like “confusing UX” to users who bounce before the content paints.
When clients approve public screenshots and metrics, we publish them. Until then, the method and the pattern list are the honest asset.
Audit to action: how findings become a fix list with priorities
An audit that ends as a PDF graveyard has failed. We score each finding on:
- Impact on the primary journey (enquiry, purchase, booking, activation)
- Evidence strength (analytics + session vs heuristic-only)
- Effort (copy change, component fix, IA change, rebuild)
- Risk (legal, accessibility, revenue)
Then we bucket:
- Ship this sprint - copy, hierarchy, form fields, broken states
- Plan this quarter - template changes, navigation, proof blocks
- Strategic - redesign, replatform, or CRO programme
Owners matter. A fix without a person and a release window is decoration. After the audit, many teams either run fixes under a build band or continue under Support & Growth; others need the redesign conversation with eyes open on redesign cost.
When you need an audit vs a redesign vs CRO
Choose an audit when you suspect friction but cannot name it, before you spend on a full visual rebuild, or when stakeholders disagree about what is broken.
Choose CRO when the template is basically right and you need experiment discipline on specific leaks - conversion rate work.
Choose a redesign when IA, CMS limits or brand system are the constraint, not a single CTA colour. Audit first if the brief is still fuzzy.
Choose neither yet when you have no analytics, no primary KPI and no owner. Fix measurement, then audit.
Pack analytics access, the primary conversion and three journeys you care about. Book the audit through product design.
