WordPress Site Audit: five business days, fixed scope. The first paid step toward a serious site. A senior set of eyes on the things that decide whether your site earns its keep: performance, SEO, security, code quality, and the path a buyer takes from search to conversion. Written report, recorded walkthrough, debrief call with your team.
Fixed price: $2,200 CAD.
Senior WordPress engineering since 2007 · E-E-A-T-first builds with verified schema, AODA and WCAG 2.2 AA compliance · dozens of plugins released, five on WordPress.org, 18+ WordCamp talks · Fort Erie, Ontario
The problem you’re solving
Your site is live, money is moving through it, and something is not right. Maybe rankings have slipped and your SEO consultant says “it’s a technical issue.” Maybe the next quarter’s roadmap calls for a $50,000 rebuild and you need to know whether you are about to spend that money on the wrong problem.
Most WordPress audits sold in this market are sales calls dressed up as deliverables. They are a thin checklist run against a free tool, designed to surface findings that conveniently match the auditor’s retainer offer. This is not that.
What you get
Six artifacts, every audit, every time: a written report (PDF, 8–14 pages), a prioritized top-five fix list, a recorded walkthrough, a 45-minute live debrief call with up to four of your team, a 30-day Shadow plugin install, and a written “what it would cost to fix this” scope appended to the report.
The full deliverable list, the day-by-day timeline, the 12 checks I run, and the FAQ that defends the fixed price live on the canonical service page: /services/wordpress-audit-deep/. That is where you book.
What this audit is not
- Not implementation. The audit ships a fix list, not the fixes themselves. Implementation is a separate engagement at the senior-developer rate.
- Not a sales pitch. The report does not invent findings to manufacture a retainer. Sometimes the honest answer is “your site is in good shape, spend your money on content.”
- Not a multi-site enterprise audit. Newsroom networks, multi-school LMS deployments, and franchise systems are quoted separately.
- Not a security incident response. If your site is currently compromised, this is the wrong engagement.
Who this is for
- ✅ Operating WordPress sites generating revenue, leads, or measurable engagement. Performance has plateaued, conversion has dropped, or a redesign is on the calendar and you need a defensible baseline first.
- ✅ Media, education, and government teams whose audit document needs to survive a procurement or accreditation review.
- ✅ In-house teams who can implement the fixes themselves and need an outside pair of eyes to surface what the team has stopped seeing.
An audit needs a site with enough pages to find patterns in, so it starts earning its keep from about ten indexed pages upward. There is a free version as well, and it is genuinely useful: the published checklist on the blog, the interactive tool, and the twenty-minute call. The paid audit is what you get when I run all of that against your site myself.
Why work with me on this specifically
- WordPress development since 2007. Audit-class engagements have been part of the work since well before “Core Web Vitals” was a phrase.
- Part of the team on a 2011 to 2012 platform migration for one of Canada’s largest news networks, plus prior work with Canadian government and political organizations.
- MA Candidate in Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University. Author of practical WordPress and SEO articles. Speaker at WordCamp Toronto.
- Day job: Training and Development Specialist at Sherwin-Williams. Audit work happens outside that scope, on independent client engagements.
This is absolute gem of a presentation by Chris Ross which proves yet again that you can still earn a decent wage by providing VALUE to people for free. Awesome job Mr. Ross.
Lorne Fade, 9thsphere.com, on a WordCamp Toronto talk, March 2012.
The testimonial above is from a public speaking engagement, not a paid audit. The audit is a newly named offer; the first audit-engagement case study will publish on the blog with the buyer’s permission once the first audit ships.
Common questions
What do we actually get at the end?
A written report you can hand to anyone, with findings in priority order, what each one is costing you, and what fixing it involves. Not a tool export with two hundred rows. If a finding does not change a decision, it does not go in, which is why the report is short enough to read.
Do you fix what you find?
I can, and you are under no obligation. Some clients take the report to their own team or their existing agency, which is a completely reasonable outcome and the report is written to be usable that way. The audit is a fixed scope on its own so the diagnosis is never a sales pitch in disguise.
Is it worth auditing if we already know the site is slow?
Often yes, because knowing the site is slow is not the same as knowing why. Slow has perhaps a dozen common causes and they need different fixes at very different costs. The expensive mistake is spending a rebuild budget on a problem that was one query and a caching rule.
When you are ready
WordPress Site Audit: five business days, complete written report, recorded walkthrough, and a debrief call with your team. The full deliverables and timeline live on the canonical service page; book there or take the discovery call first.
Or take the 20-minute discovery call
Tell me about your project
The fastest way to a straight answer. Tell me what you need and I will reply within a business day, honestly, even when the answer is that I am not the right fit.
Prefer to talk? Call 647-641-0643
Share your project details
Use this form for project scope, technical SEO support, onsite training requests, or a focused next-step conversation.