Most website audits handed to public agencies are SEO audits wearing a broader title. They report keyword rankings, missing meta descriptions and a crawl error list, then recommend a redesign. Useful, but incomplete — they say nothing about whether a resident using a screen reader can submit a form, whether the site would survive a credential compromise, or whether the county’s fee schedule is accurate.
A genuinely useful government website audit examines the site as public infrastructure. The framework below is organized into eight areas and is designed so internal staff can run much of it without specialized tooling, producing a prioritized modernization list rather than a document that sits in a drawer.
1. Accessibility
Start here, because it carries legal exposure and affects service delivery directly. Run an automated scan across templates and top pages, then test manually: navigate the site using only the keyboard, check visible focus, confirm form labels and error messages, verify contrast, and open key pages with a screen reader. Inventory PDFs and identify which are untagged or image-only. Test third-party embeds — payments, permitting, agendas, maps — separately, since a government accessibility audit that skips vendor tools misses where residents actually get stuck.
2. Content architecture and accuracy
Build an inventory of your top one hundred pages by traffic. For each, record the content owner, the last review date and whether the information is currently correct. Flag duplicates left from prior redesigns, orphan pages with no internal links, and services that lack a dedicated page. Check whether the top twenty resident tasks can be reached in two clicks from the homepage. Accuracy problems — an outdated fee, a former department head, a superseded form — are the highest-severity findings in any municipal website audit.
3. Search visibility
The government SEO audit layer still matters. Confirm unique, descriptive title tags and meta descriptions on service pages; a clean URL structure; a current XML sitemap submitted to search consoles; a robots.txt that blocks nothing important; correct canonical tags; and no indexing of staging environments. Review search console data for high-impression, low-click pages — these are usually poorly titled pages that answer real questions.
4. Performance
Test on mobile with a throttled connection, not on the office fiber line. Measure Core Web Vitals on the homepage, a department page, a service page and a form. Typical culprits on municipal sites: uncompressed images, homepage sliders, multiple embedded third-party scripts, unoptimized fonts and no caching layer. Record load times so improvement can be demonstrated later.
5. Security and continuity
Confirm HTTPS sitewide with automatic renewal, current CMS and plugin versions, multi-factor authentication enforced for all administrative accounts, and least-privilege roles. Review the user list for accounts belonging to former staff or former vendors — a near-universal finding. Verify offsite backups exist and that a restore has actually been tested. Document the incident response plan, hosting arrangement and who holds domain registrar access.
6. Analytics and measurement
Check that analytics is installed once, correctly, with a documented retention and privacy posture. Confirm that goals or conversions are configured for meaningful actions — form submissions, payments, document downloads. Enable and review internal site search reporting; queries returning no results are a direct list of content gaps. Note whether anyone actually reviews the data on a schedule.
7. Structured data
Assess whether the site describes itself to machines. Look for GovernmentOrganization markup sitewide, GovernmentService markup on service pages, Place and hours for facilities, Event markup for public meetings, and FAQ markup where appropriate. Validate existing markup and check for conflicts from multiple plugins generating competing graphs.
8. AI readiness
A modern government AI readiness audit tests how well machines can extract answers. Pick fifteen common resident questions and check whether each has a dedicated page that answers it in the first paragraph. Confirm key information lives in HTML rather than PDF-only. Verify last-reviewed dates are visible. Then run those same questions through major AI assistants and compare the answers to your published facts — every discrepancy points to a page that needs work or a third-party source outranking you.
Scoring and prioritizing
Rate each area on a simple scale and classify every finding by severity and effort. A workable priority order for most agencies:
- Immediate: security exposures, inaccurate public information, accessibility barriers blocking a service
- Near term: template-level accessibility fixes, top-twenty service page rewrites, performance basics, analytics configuration
- Planned: structured data rollout, PDF conversion, navigation restructuring, AI readiness improvements
- Ongoing: content review cadence, editor training, vendor accessibility requirements, annual re-audit
Turning findings into a plan
A public sector website assessment only creates value if it converts into a funded, sequenced roadmap. Present findings by resident impact rather than technical category, attach rough effort estimates, and identify what can be done by existing staff versus what requires a vendor. Publish the roadmap so councils and residents can see progress.
Run the full audit annually and a lighter accessibility and accuracy review quarterly. The goal is not a perfect score — it is a website that stays trustworthy, usable and secure between redesigns.