The $149 Teardown: What Actually Goes In A Shipside Site Audit

When I quote a $149 teardown, the first question is usually “what do I actually get?” Fair. Here’s the full breakdown.

What you get

One: A 10-12 minute Loom walkthrough of your site.

Not a Zoom call. Not a meeting. A recorded screen share where I open your site in Chrome and walk through everything I see — mobile and desktop, homepage and contact page, the first-click path from landing to conversion. I narrate what’s broken, what’s working, and why.

You watch it on your own time. You don’t have to coordinate a calendar. You don’t have to make small talk. You get a link in your inbox and you can watch it at 1:00am if that’s when you have ten minutes.

Two: A 1-page fix plan.

Top 5 issues on your site, ranked by dollar impact. For each issue:

What’s broken
Why it matters (usually tied to a specific metric — Google speed score, conversion drop-off, local pack ranking penalty)
How to fix it (in plain language, not jargon)
Estimated time/cost to fix
What to expect in revenue terms if you fix it

The 1-page format is deliberate. You don’t need a 30-page report you’ll never read. You need the five things that move the needle, on one page, printable, actionable.

Three: Permission to keep the plan regardless.

If you want me to do the rebuild, the $149 credits toward the $499 flat rebuild price. If you don’t, you keep the plan and hire anyone you want — your current web guy, a Fiverr developer, your nephew who knows HTML — to execute it.

The fix plan is yours. I’m not going to hold it hostage. I’m not going to try to upsell you. If the plan is enough and you don’t need me after that, good.

What I actually check during the audit

A partial list, in the order I go through them:

Google PageSpeed mobile score (the big one)
Google PageSpeed desktop score
Contact form field count and layout
Tap-to-call link on mobile
Click-to-text link on mobile
Form submission flow — does it show a real thank-you page? Fire conversion events?
Hero headline — does it say what you do and for whom, in under 8 words?
CTA visibility above the fold on mobile
Google Business Profile URL consistency (with or without www, http vs https)
Schema.org markup presence (LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage)
Sitemap.xml existence
Robots.txt sanity check
Plugin count if WordPress (and which ones are outdated)
Theme age if WordPress
Hosting provider (tells me where to expect performance ceilings)
SSL certificate and redirect chain
Broken links on homepage
Image compression (4MB hero images are common)
Third-party script load (Google Ads pixels, Facebook pixels, chat widgets)
Service area page structure (are there city-specific pages?)

Not all 20 make it into the fix plan. Only the five with the biggest dollar impact for your specific site. A law firm audit looks different than an HVAC audit looks different than a med spa audit.

Why the price is $149

Two reasons.

One: it’s cheap enough that nobody has to ask permission to buy it. A local business owner can expense $149 without a board meeting. $500 is a different conversation. $149 is a “fine, let’s see what he finds” decision.

Two: it qualifies the lead. If someone isn’t willing to spend $149 to find out what’s broken on their site, they’re not going to spend $499 to fix it. The teardown filters the serious from the not-serious, which saves me the time of doing discovery calls with people who were never going to buy anything.

I don’t do free audits. Free audits attract tire-kickers and burn time. $149 is the smallest price that filters out the tire-kickers without locking out the real buyers.

Turnaround

48 hours from purchase to Loom delivery. Usually faster. I block two days a week for teardowns and batch them.

What happens if your site is already good

If I look at your site and it’s genuinely fine — pagespeed score above 75, form is under 5 fields, tap-to-call works, booking path is clean — I’ll tell you in the Loom and refund the $149. I’d rather give you the money back than stretch to find fake problems.

That’s happened twice in the last year. Both were sites where the owner had already worked with a good developer. I sent the refund and moved on.

Most sites aren’t that site.