Module 6 · Audit before anyone sees it

The eight-lane audit

Your site works. That is a different thing from your site being ready. This is the pass where you stop being its author and start being the person on the other side — the referred client on a phone, the screen-reader user, the opposing counsel with a spare afternoon. Eight lanes, one prompt, one fix loop.

Watch — hand-picked

The clearest walkthroughs of this step, from creators we rate. Each one’s credited — go give them a follow.

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5:44

Why this is its own job

You have been looking at this site for two days. You know what every button is supposed to do, so you no longer see whether it does it. That is the same blindness that makes proofing your own brief harder than proofing someone else’s, and the fix is the same: change who is reading.

The audit prompt below hands the site to Claude as an outside reader with a checklist. It works through eight lanes on the running site — opening the preview and clicking through pages, not just reading the code — reports what it found in plain sentences, fixes what it can, and flags what is your call rather than its own.

The eight lanes

Lanes 1 to 6 are the standard pre-launch pass any good site gets. Lanes 7 and 8 exist because a law firm’s website has a job beyond looking right, and because the two things most likely to be quietly broken on launch day are the button nobody clicked and the form nobody submitted.

Paste this into Claude Code

Let's do Stage 5 — audit my whole site, then fix what you find. Work on the running
site in the preview: open the pages and click through them, don't only read the code.

1. MOBILE & DESKTOP — every page correct at phone, tablet and laptop widths; menu
   collapses cleanly; nothing scrolls sideways; tap targets at least 44x44px.
2. ACCESSIBILITY — WCAG 2.2 AA. Body text contrast at least 4.5:1 (3:1 for large text
   and for buttons, borders and icons); alt text on every meaningful image and empty
   alt on decorative ones; a real label on every form field; one h1 per page and
   heading levels in order; every interactive element reachable by keyboard with a
   visible focus ring; the page language declared. Do NOT suggest an accessibility
   overlay widget — if I ever ask for one, tell me why not.
3. SEO BASICS — unique title and meta description per page, one main heading,
   Open Graph tags, sitemap.xml and robots.txt.
4. PERFORMANCE — images optimized and correctly sized, nothing heavy loading for no
   reason, no layout shift as the page loads.
5. LINKS & CONTENT — no broken links, no leftover placeholder text, spelling and
   grammar clean, my real firm name, phone, address and service area everywhere.
6. POLISH — favicon from my logo, an on-brand 404 page, consistent contact details.
7. CONVERSION — check every page against site-architecture.md: exactly one primary
   and one secondary call to action, placed as planned; a call to action at the end of
   every practice-area page; every phone number a working tel: link; the phone number
   visible without scrolling; the sticky call bar working on mobile and not covering
   the form or the last section of the page.
8. INTAKE — walk the whole path: form, thank-you page, auto-reply, booking link. Tell
   me exactly which of these you can verify yourself and which I have to test by hand.

Report what you found in short plain sentences before you change anything. Then fix
what you can fix, save a snapshot, and give me a numbered list of anything that needs
my decision rather than yours.

Accessibility, for a law firm specifically

Take this lane more seriously than a plumber would, for a reason that has nothing to do with doing the right thing and everything to do with the docket. Seyfarth Shaw’s ADA Title III tracker counts federal filings directly: 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025, up 27% on the year before. Demand letters — which never reach a docket — are more numerous still.

And nearly every site fails. WebAIM’s February 2026 survey of the top million home pages found detectable failures on 95.9% of them, with low-contrast text, missing alt text and missing form labels leading the list. Those are exactly the failures an automated scan catches in seconds, which is why they are what a demand letter is built from.

Say the uncomfortable part out loud: a firm that advertises ADA or civil-rights work on a website failing the same automated scan has handed the other side a free paragraph. The target is WCAG 2.2 level AA — the standard courts, settlements and federal agencies point at. The specifics ride the audit prompt; four of them do most of the work.

The two lanes only you can finish

Claude can read your code and click your preview. It cannot receive your email, hold your phone, or know what you promised a visitor in Module 3. These two lanes end with you.

The fix loop

1. Run the audit prompt and read the report before you agree to anything. You are the one who knows which flags matter for your practice.
2. Let Claude fix the clear defects — contrast, alt text, labels, broken links, placeholder text, missing titles.
3. Work through its “needs your decision” list one item at a time, answering in plain English.
4. Run your own conversion and intake checks by hand, on your phone.
5. Re-run the audit prompt once. A clean second pass is what “done” looks like.
6. Ask Claude to save a snapshot before you move on, so this state is recoverable.

Then stop. Some findings you will consciously defer — a nice-to-have image treatment, a page you have not written yet. Deferring on purpose is fine. Write the deferrals down so they are decisions rather than oversights.