How to audit a landing page in 15 minutes

Most landing page reviews are vibes. Someone glances at your page, says the headline could be punchier, and moves on. That feedback feels useful and changes nothing. A real audit is repeatable: same checks, same order, every time, so you can tell whether last week's change actually helped.

Here is the 15-minute version we run, and the order matters. Start with what you can measure, finish with judgment.

1. Open the first mobile screen and stop scrolling

Load your page on a 390px-wide phone viewport and look at only the first screen, before any scroll. Can a stranger tell what you sell and what to do next? Most landing pages fail here: the first screen is a logo, a vague headline, and a cookie banner sitting on top of the button. If the value proposition and one clear action aren't both visible without scrolling, nothing else matters yet.

2. Measure speed, don't guess it

Speed is not a feeling, it's three numbers. Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content appears), Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps around as it loads), and Total Blocking Time (how long the page is frozen to taps). Run your URL through Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights and read the lab values. A 4-second LCP on mobile means a chunk of your paid traffic leaves before the page even renders.

3. Check the things you cannot see

Accessibility problems are invisible until they cost you a customer. Run axe-core on the rendered page and you will usually find the same three: text that fails contrast against the background, images with no alt text, and form inputs with no label. Low contrast gray-on-dark body copy is the most common one, and it quietly makes your page harder to read for everyone, not just screen-reader users.

4. Read the copy like a stranger who owes you nothing

Now the judgment part. Go criterion by criterion: is the hero specific or could a dozen competitors use the same line? Is there one obvious primary action, or five buttons competing? Does the page answer the top three objections before the visitor has to ask? Is the pricing visible, or hidden behind 'Contact sales'? Write down the exact words on the page, not a general impression.

The 15-minute checklist

• →First mobile screen shows what-it-is plus one clear CTA
• →LCP under 2.5s, CLS under 0.1 on mobile
• →Zero contrast failures, every image has alt text, every input has a label
• →One primary CTA, not five competing buttons
• →Pricing is visible, objections are answered on the page
• →Headline is specific to you, not swappable with a competitor

A chat model can do step 4 from the text you paste. It cannot do steps 1 to 3, because it never loads your page. That gap is the whole reason measured audits beat 'paste my copy into ChatGPT'. If you want the measured version without running the tools yourself, that is exactly what BrutalRoast does: it loads your live page in a real browser, measures speed, accessibility and SEO, screenshots your actual mobile render, then roasts what's broken.