This is the exact report format you receive. Site audited: thedevbrief.com (my own site). Audit run 12 October 2026 with Lighthouse 12, mobile emulation, plus a manual crawl of every link on the homepage.
Summary
| Area | Score before | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SEO (crawlability, titles, descriptions, sitemap, robots) | 100 / 100 | Pass — nothing to fix |
| Performance (mobile) | 94 / 100 | Good — 2 improvements applied |
| Best practices | 75 / 100 | 1 error found and fixed, 1 noted |
| Broken links (homepage, 27 internal URLs + all assets) | 0 broken | Pass |
What I checked
- Indexability: robots.txt allows crawling, sitemap_index.xml returns 200 and is declared in robots.txt. Homepage has a unique title (62 characters) and a meta description. Canonical tag present. HTTPS enforced.
- Core Web Vitals (mobile): First Contentful Paint 1.2 s · Largest Contentful Paint 2.4 s · Total Blocking Time 220 ms · Cumulative Layout Shift 0 · Speed Index 1.6 s · server response 320 ms · page weight 650 KiB. All within Google’s “good” thresholds except LCP, which is borderline (target under 2.5 s).
- Links: crawled every internal link and image/script on the homepage — all return 200.
Problems found
- A resource on the homepage returns 404. One file requested by the page does not exist. Invisible to visitors, but it’s a console error that costs best-practice score and a wasted request on every page load. Fixed: the site had no icon set, so every page load requested a /favicon.ico that didn’t exist. Set a site icon; pages now reference a real file.
- Images served as JPEG instead of WebP. Five article thumbnails (32–70 KiB each) could be 45% smaller. Estimated saving 108 KiB per page load, ~166 KiB including resizing. Fixed: installed a WebP converter; all 147 media files converted (24.9 MB saved, 46%); the server now returns image/webp to browsers that accept it, with the JPEG kept as fallback.
- Third-party scripts block the main thread for ~410 ms (Google Tag Manager). This is the main drag on the LCP. Noted, not changed: the tracking is intentional. Recommendation: load GTM with a 2-second delay or remove it until analytics are actually used.
- One third-party cookie (
__cf_bm, Cloudflare bot-management). Harmless, set by the CDN. Noted, no action.
Fixes applied (2 of 3 included)
- Site icon set — the missing-favicon 404 on every page load is gone.
- WebP delivery for all 147 images (verified:
content-type: image/webp,Vary: Accept).
Third fix slot left unused: nothing else on the site met the bar of “clearly broken and safe to change without discussion.”
Scores above are the “before” run. A full “after” run is included in client reports; on this site the measured change is −108 KiB of images per page load and one fewer failed request.
What’s left (prioritised)
- Delay Google Tag Manager by 2 s or remove it — expected to bring LCP under 2.0 s.
- Serve article thumbnails at the displayed size (currently 768 px wide for a 400 px slot).
- Nothing else. The site is technically sound.
Every client report follows this structure: what was checked, what was found with evidence, what was changed, what remains — in plain language, in English or French. Order a Health Check for your site.