A Latvian office of an international professional services firm asked us to audit its website. No rebuild, no redesign: the site runs on the group’s global platform, and the question was simply what is wrong with it and what can be done about it. Anonymised at the client’s request.
Scoped to what the team can act on
An audit is only worth the pages it is printed on if someone can act on every line. So before writing anything we went through the platform block by block and tested which content options actually work in the local admin. Nothing in the report was a recommendation the team would try on a Monday and find greyed out.
We also benchmarked the site against the group’s other country sites, block by block. That separates “different from the others” from “actually wrong”, which matters when a local team has been told for years that the platform is simply how it is. Most differences turned out to be fine. A handful were not, and those got flagged.
What it found
Things a visitor hits. Buttons that look interactive and do nothing when clicked. Cards where only part of the surface responds. Pages returning 404 from links still live in the navigation. Internal links leaving for the global site in the middle of a local journey. A page load that stalls roughly one time in ten.
Things that quietly cost credibility. A service page publishing a personal email address for someone who had already left the firm. Two competing pages covering the same topic, both indexed. Formatting that changed character from one page to the next. Content that had drifted apart between the Latvian and English versions of the same page.
Things search engines and social platforms see. Missing page descriptions. Share metadata pulling the wrong title and image, so every link posted anywhere looked generic regardless of what it pointed to.
And the finding that mattered most: nothing on the site captured an enquiry. Visitors could read, and then they were finished. The platform supported a contact form. It simply was not being used anywhere.
How it was delivered, and what happened next
Every finding sorted into three piles: what the local team can do itself, what only head office can release, and what to accept and stop worrying about. That last pile saves the most time, because it ends the recurring meeting about the things nobody can change.
The team worked straight through their own pile. Dead links and 404s cleared, the stale contact detail pulled, page descriptions and share metadata filled in so links stop looking generic wherever they get posted, and the contact form finally placed on the pages where an enquiry was likely. The rest went upstream as a specific, evidenced list of platform faults rather than a general complaint, which is the version head office can actually assign to someone.
What the client ended up with is a site their own people can keep improving without waiting on anyone, and a clear record of the parts that were never theirs to fix.