You launched. Traffic's fine. But people aren't doing the thing you built the site to make them do. That gap - between "they showed up" and "they converted" - is where a UX audit earns its money.
What it actually is
A UX audit is me going through your product the way a frustrated user would, but with a checklist. Where do people get stuck? Where do they quietly give up? What's standing between them and the button you want them to press? It's usability measured against principles that have held up for decades (Nielsen's heuristics), not against my personal taste.
What I look at
Navigation and whether people can find things. Whether the flows make sense or double back on themselves. Mobile, properly - not "it technically loads." Accessibility. And whether your CTAs are actually clear or just present. Nothing exotic. It's the boring stuff that quietly leaks conversions.
Can you do it yourself?
Honestly, partly yes. Hotjar, Google Analytics, and the Nielsen checklist will get you a real first pass, and I'd rather you do that than nothing. What you're paying a professional for is fresh eyes and pattern recognition - I've seen the same three mistakes across dozens of projects, so I spot them fast and tell you which ones actually matter.
The part everyone skips
An audit nobody acts on is just an expensive PDF. The value isn't the findings, it's the fixing. So I hand you a prioritized list, not a wall of problems - start with the high-impact, low-effort wins, then work toward the structural stuff. If you only fix three things, I'll tell you which three.
That "$100 back for every $1 spent on UX" stat gets thrown around a lot. I don't love quoting numbers I can't verify - but the underlying point is real: friction is expensive, and most of it is fixable.