Sixty checks across six categories, scored by severity, mapped to Nielsen's heuristics and WCAG 2.2 where relevant. Tick as you go. Progress saves to your browser. Print as a PDF when finished.
Most UX audit checklists in circulation either sprawl into 200-item catalogues that nobody finishes or collapse into 15-item glosses that miss the failure modes most sites actually have. 60 items is the operational middle ground — comprehensive enough to catch the recurring issues across navigation, forms, accessibility, content, performance and conversion, tight enough to complete inside a single working session on a mid-sized site.
The 60 items on this page are drawn from audit deliverables shipped to real clients between 2020 and 2026, across ecommerce, SaaS, financial services, publishing and B2B lead-gen. The categories are ordered by conversion sensitivity: navigation and forms are the two categories that most directly gate the primary conversion action on any site, which is why they lead. Accessibility and content sit in the middle because they compound; low-severity items in these categories quietly erode conversion across every session rather than blocking specific transactions. Performance and conversion close the checklist because they are the categories most audit reports underweight — performance issues drive silent churn that isn't visible in session recordings, and conversion-specific items catch the friction that survives the earlier five categories.
Two-pass approach works best. On the first pass, run the checklist against the site's primary conversion journey — homepage to key conversion, plus one or two adjacent flows. Check every item honestly; skip nothing. Progress persists in your browser, so it's safe to close the tab and resume.
On the second pass, revisit any item marked as failing and assign severity using the built-in high/medium/low tags. The severity signal matters more than the pass/fail signal in the final report; a checklist with 40 failures ranked by severity is far more actionable than one with 40 unranked failures. Severity should be calibrated to conversion impact and effort-to-fix, not to how obviously wrong the item looks.
Print or export as markdown when finished; the completed checklist becomes the appendix of the audit report and evidence of methodology when the client asks how findings were derived. Pair the checklist output with a written narrative in the worked audit report example to produce a shippable deliverable rather than a raw findings dump.
The category that most directly gates conversion. Checks cover primary navigation clarity, breadcrumb presence on deep pages, search functionality and result quality, hover and active state affordance, and the ability to return to a canonical starting point from any page. Navigation issues are almost always high-severity because they compound: a user who can't find a product page is a user who never sees the product-page conversion friction.
The most common conversion killer on transactional sites. Checks cover label positioning and clarity, error message specificity and timing, input type appropriateness (tel/email/date), autocomplete attributes for browser autofill, inline validation vs on-submit validation, and error recovery. A single misplaced form validation pattern can drop conversion 10-20% and rarely shows up in surface-level QA because the developer testing the form is filling it in correctly first time.
The category that quietly protects the site legally and expands the addressable audience. Checks cover colour contrast (both text and non-text), keyboard operability, focus visibility, alt text on informative imagery, form-label programmatic association, heading structure, and skip links. WCAG 2.2 introduced nine new success criteria in 2023 — most audits in circulation predate them. The relevant additions are covered in the WCAG 2.2 changes summary.
Where trust is built or lost. Checks cover heading hierarchy accuracy, scannable body copy, CTA verb specificity (not "click here"), error message tone, empty-state guidance, and reading-age appropriateness for the audience. Content issues are frequently deprioritised in audit deliverables because they look small individually, but a site with 40 content-and-microcopy failures reads as unfinished regardless of visual polish.
The category most audit reports mention and don't investigate. Checks cover Core Web Vitals (LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1), image compression and format modernisation (WebP/AVIF), font loading strategy, JavaScript bundle size on entry pages, and layout shift on lazy-loaded content. Performance failures drive silent churn — users don't complete a form on a page that took eight seconds to become interactive; they don't report the reason.
The category that surfaces the failure modes surviving the earlier five categories. Checks cover primary CTA visibility above the fold, trust signals near conversion points (reviews, security badges, guarantees), price and shipping transparency, checkout friction (guest checkout availability, field count), and post-conversion confirmation clarity. A site can pass navigation, forms, accessibility, content and performance and still convert weakly because trust and conversion-specific friction is unaddressed.
High severity is reserved for items that block conversion for a measurable audience segment, expose the client to legal or reputational risk, or contradict a WCAG 2.2 AA requirement. Roughly 10-20% of failed items in a typical audit are high severity. Reserving the tag prevents severity inflation, which is the primary reason clients ignore audit reports.
Medium severity is the workhorse tag. It covers items that degrade the experience for most users without blocking the conversion outright, or that will become high severity once compounded with other medium items. Most failed items land here.
Low severity is reserved for polish items: minor microcopy improvements, small inconsistencies in spacing or type, non-critical accessibility improvements. Include them in the appendix rather than the executive summary. Grouping low-severity items under a single "quick wins" section in the report keeps the report shippable rather than overwhelming.
The checklist pairs with the UX audit hub (scoping, pricing, deliverables), the audit methodology guide (the process narrative around the checklist), the audit report template (the shippable format the checklist feeds into), the worked audit report example (a real audit deliverable end to end), and the heuristic evaluation guide (the ten-heuristic framework that sits alongside checklist-based audits).