What is a UX audit?

A UX audit looks past opinion and grades a page against repeatable criteria. Most audits cover three broad areas: functional UX (can a visitor understand the page, find what they need, and take the next action?), aesthetic quality (is the visual hierarchy clear, the typography readable, the design calm enough to trust?), and design best practices (does the page apply known usability and conversion heuristics — clear signifiers, low cognitive load, credible social proof, a single obvious call to action?).

A good audit ends with prioritized, specific findings — not a vague vibe check. Each issue should name what's wrong, why it matters, and roughly how to fix it, so a team can act without guessing.

Traditional UX audits are done by a consultant over days or weeks. They're thorough but slow, expensive, and inconsistent between reviewers. Automated UX audits — like Sensei — analyze a public page in seconds and return a comparable score, which makes them ideal for benchmarking, tracking changes over time, and triaging where a human deep-dive is worth it.

The two are complementary: an automated audit tells you where you stand and where the friction is; a human audit (or live user testing) validates the highest-risk changes with real context an automated pass can't see.

Start with the pages that matter most to the business — usually the homepage, a key product or pricing page, and the primary conversion flow. Score each against the three layers above, capture the specific findings, and rank them by impact and effort.

Sensei runs this automatically: paste a URL and it returns a weighted UX score plus layer-by-layer findings you can act on. Use it to benchmark against competitors, re-check after a redesign, or decide where a deeper review is worth the time.