I spent an entire afternoon wondering why my client's Next.js portfolio wasn't showing up on Google. Clean code, fast load times, good content. Turned out the meta tags were rendering after the crawler gave up. One audit. That's all it took to find it. If you're shipping sites without running a structured audit first, you're guessing. This article walks through how to audit a website properly using free tools, including how to build a lightweight audit script yourself, so you stop guessing and start shipping with confidence. Why Most Developers Skip Audits (And Pay for It Later) Auditing feels like QA work: unglamorous, easy to defer. But consider: Google's crawler doesn't execute JavaScript the same way your browser does. Lighthouse scores don't catch missing canonical tags. And broken internal links are practically invisible until a real user hits a dead end. The good news is that website audit tools free of cost are genuinely powerful now, and you don't have to leave your terminal to use them.…