WordPress Site Audit — $2,200, 5 business days, complete written report, recorded walkthrough, and a debrief call with your team. A fixed-scope review of 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.
Recent senior WordPress work: Sherwin-Williams · M.L. Campbell, a Sherwin-Williams operating company · Sayerlack · one of Canada’s largest news networks during a 2011–2012 platform migration
Book the audit — $2,200 Ask a question first
This is the engagement to book when your site is live, money is moving through it, and you need a senior pair of eyes on it before you spend the next $50,000 rebuilding the wrong thing. It is not a sales call dressed up as a deliverable. The report is the same report whether you become a long-term client or never speak to me again.
What you get
Six artifacts. Every audit, every time. No upsells, no surprise line items, no “we ran out of time on this part.”
- A written audit report (PDF, 8–14 pages). The 12-check framework applied to your site, with specific findings, screenshots, and prioritization. Every finding cites the actual page or system on your site — no generic template fluff.
- A prioritized fix list (top five). Twelve checks produce a longer findings list. The report calls out the top five by revenue impact over implementation effort. Your team can act on this list without me.
- A recorded walkthrough (Loom-style, 25–35 minutes). Me reading the report on camera, naming the three things I would do first if it were my site. Share it with stakeholders who could not attend the debrief.
- A 45-minute live debrief call. Scheduled within 5 business days of report delivery. Bring up to four people from your team. We walk findings, answer questions, and decide what happens next.
- A 30-day Shadow plugin install. The internal tooling I use to surface what most audits miss — third-party script weight over time, attachment bloat, plugin update lag, broken outbound links. Read-only access for your team while we work.
- A written “what it would cost to fix this” scope. Appended to the report. Either an hours-and-rate range or a retainer recommendation. Take it to your decision-makers without scheduling another call.
What this audit is not
Defining the shoulder of the scope is part of what makes the price honest.
- 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.” That answer ships when it is the right answer.
- Not a multi-site enterprise audit. Newsroom networks, multi-school LMS deployments, and franchise systems are quoted separately. One WordPress install, one staging environment, one production site.
- Not unlimited revisions. One report, one walkthrough, one debrief. Follow-up questions are welcome on the debrief call. Anything beyond the debrief is a change order at the headline rate.
- Not a security incident response. If your site is currently compromised or actively under attack, this is the wrong engagement. Email me directly and I will refer you to incident-response specialists.
Who this is for
- ✅ Operating WordPress sites generating revenue, leads, or measurable engagement. Performance has plateaued, conversion has dropped, or the team is preparing for a redesign and needs a defensible baseline first.
- ✅ Media, education, and government teams running WordPress at scale. The audit produces a document that survives scrutiny in a procurement review.
- ✅ Niagara-region businesses and Canadian organizations who want to talk to a senior practitioner who actually answers the phone and lives in the same time zone.
- ✅ In-house teams who can implement the fixes themselves and need an outside pair of eyes to surface what the team has stopped seeing after a year of working in the same codebase.
- ❌ Sites that are not yet built or have fewer than ten indexed pages. Audit findings need a site that exists at scale to be meaningful.
- ❌ Buyers who need the price below $2,200 to make this work. The audit does not discount; the right next step is the free 20-minute discovery call so we can talk through whether a smaller engagement makes sense.
- ❌ Anyone looking for a free audit. The free version is the published checklist on the blog, the interactive tool, and the discovery call. The paid version is what you get when I run it on your site, with my eyes, my tools, and my judgment.
The 5 business days
The clock starts when payment is received and admin access is provisioned. The fastest engagements ship in three days; five is the cap, not the average.
- Day 1 — Kickoff and crawl. You provide WordPress admin access (a temporary administrator account, revoked at the end). Shadow installs. The crawl runs. Search Console and GA4 read-only access is shared. I send a one-paragraph “first impressions” email by end of day so you know what I have already noticed.
- Days 2–3 — The 12-check framework. I work through performance, SEO, security, accessibility, code quality, content architecture, conversion-event instrumentation, schema, internal linking, and the four supporting checks. Findings, screenshots, and prioritization go into the report as they happen.
- Day 4 — Report assembly and walkthrough recording. The PDF is finalized. The Loom walkthrough is recorded. The “what it would cost to fix this” scope is appended.
- Day 5 — Delivery. Report PDF, walkthrough link, and the written scope email arrive in your inbox before noon Eastern. The debrief call is already on your calendar; we hold it within 5 business days of delivery.
If your team cannot get me access within 10 business days of payment, the engagement pauses without penalty. If we lose contact past 30 days, the deliverable still ships against whatever I can audit externally and the engagement closes. No infinite tails on either side.
The 12 checks I run on every audit
These are the headlines. The pillar guide on the blog explains each one in depth, with the same plain-language examples I use during the debrief.
- Performance and Core Web Vitals. p75 LCP per template on mobile over the last 28 days. The number that drives ranking and correlates most cleanly with conversion.
- SEO health and indexation. Search Console coverage, schema enhancement reports, internal linking architecture, and the gap between what should be indexed and what actually is.
- Security posture. User accounts, plugin update lag, file permissions, login surface area, exposed admin paths, and the things attackers actually use against WordPress in the wild.
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA). Focus states, colour contrast, keyboard navigation, form labels, headings outline, motion preferences. Real automated and manual checks, not a third-party badge.
- Code quality and plugin health. Active plugin count, deprecated plugins, abandoned plugins, plugin conflict surface, theme override patterns, custom code that should be a plugin.
- Content architecture. Categories versus tags, taxonomy redundancy, orphan content, thin pages, content that contradicts other content on the same site.
- Conversion-event instrumentation. GA4 form-completion events, lead-source attribution, the gap between “we get traffic” and “we can prove organic search converts.”
- Schema and structured data. Service, Article, Product, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Organization, Person markup. Each Search Console enhancement report cleared and validating.
- Internal linking and authority flow. Where authority is leaking out of the site and which pages are starved of internal links they deserve.
- Image and media pipeline. WebP coverage, responsive sizes, lazy loading, attachment bloat, and the orphan media that no one has audited in three years.
- Backup and recovery. Backup frequency, restore-tested versus restore-untested, off-site copies, and what your actual recovery time would be if the site went down at 3 a.m.
- Hosting and infrastructure fit. Whether the host matches the workload or whether you are paying enterprise prices for a shared environment, or vice versa.
Why work with me
- WordPress development since 2007. Over a decade of paid WordPress engagements across small business, brand training portfolios, higher education, and Canadian newsroom infrastructure.
- Engagements with Sherwin-Williams and M.L. Campbell (a Sherwin-Williams operating company), Sayerlack, prior portfolio work for one of Canada’s largest news networks during the 2011–2012 platform migration, and prior work with Canadian government and political organizations.
- Author of practical WordPress and SEO articles read by site owners across Canada and the United States. Speaker at WordCamp Toronto.
- MA in Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University. Verifiable profiles on LinkedIn, GitHub, WordPress.org, and X.
- Day job: Training and Development Specialist at Sherwin-Williams supporting the M.L. Campbell professional finishing brand. 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 testimonials above are from speaking engagements, not paid audits. 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
Why $2,200 and not “starting at” something lower?
Because the deliverable is fixed. The same six artifacts ship every time. “Starting at” pricing is what consultants use when the scope is undefined and the price is a negotiation; my scope is defined and my price is not a negotiation. If $2,200 is wrong for your situation, the right answer is a different engagement, not a discounted audit.
Can I get a refund?
Full refund within 48 hours of payment if I have not started work. Once the crawl runs and the report is in progress, the engagement is non-refundable. The report itself is yours regardless of what we decide about a follow-up engagement.
What access do you need?
A temporary WordPress administrator account, read-only access to Google Search Console for the property, and read-only access to Google Analytics 4. The administrator account is revoked at the end of the engagement. Hosting and DNS access are not required.
Is this a path to a longer engagement?
Sometimes. The audit ends with a written “what it would cost to fix this” scope, which names a fix-the-audit project, a monthly retainer, or an advisory engagement, depending on what the findings show. Roughly a third of audit clients move into a longer engagement. The other two-thirds take the report to their internal team and execute themselves, which is also a fine outcome.
I have multiple sites — does this work?
The published audit covers one WordPress install. For newsroom networks, multi-school LMS deployments, franchise systems, or brand portfolios with multiple WordPress properties, scope and price are quoted separately. Email me with the property list and the questions you are trying to answer.
I am not ready to buy. Can we talk first?
Yes. The free 20-minute discovery call is the right first step if you are not sure the audit fits your situation. Most audits are booked after a discovery call rather than off the page directly.
Ready when you are
WordPress Site Audit — $2,200, 5 business days, complete written report, recorded walkthrough, and a debrief call with your team. Pay up front, get access provisioned, and the clock starts.
Book the audit — $2,200 Twenty-minute discovery call
