The "Forward-to-Marketing" 2026 Audit Checklist: Is Your SaaS Website Leaking Revenue?

As we head toward the end of Q4, founders and executives are deep in spreadsheet mode—looking at headcount, projected ARR, and customer acquisition costs for 2026.

But while you are planning your growth, there is likely a silent liability accumulating in your digital infrastructure.

In SaaS, you don’t have a physical showroom to impress clients with marble floors or a firm handshake. You have a Digital Growth Engine.

This engine relies on a complex chain of events to generate revenue:

1. Paid Media and Organic drive the traffic.
2. The Website captures the interest.
3. Automation routes the lead to Sales.

If any link in this chain is broken, the entire system fails.

• If your website is beautiful, but your LinkedIn Ads point to a broken URL... you lose money.
• If your Ads are perfect, but your HubSpot workflow fails to alert the sales rep... you lose money.

Marketing stacks are living engines. If you haven't audited yours in the last 12 months, you are likely carrying hidden debts that kill conversions, invite legal risk, and silently erode your brand’s authority.

The question isn't whether your marketing has gaps (something always breaks!). The question is: Is your infrastructure costing you money?

I recommend auditing your Growth Engine through the lens of three specific categories: Revenue, Risk, and Reputation.

Here is what you and your team should be looking for before we hit January 1st.

P.S. Before you hand off the checklist below, understand what you are actually looking for. These aren’t small bugs—they are potential leaks in your business model.

1. Revenue. The Pipeline Leaks

What is preventing a high-intent visitor from paying you?

The Broken Calendar:

Third-party integrations (like Calendly) often break silently. If your calendar takes too long to load, you are burning ad spend on bounced traffic.

If you are paying $50–$100 per click on LinkedIn/Google Ads, a slow or broken calendar is a hole in your wallet leaking thousands of dollars per month in wasted ad spend.

The "Invisible" CTA:

On mobile devices, is your "Get Started" button covered by a chatbot, a cookie banner, or a newsletter popup? If your user has to close three windows to buy from you, they won't.

60% of B2B research now starts on mobile devices. If your mobile experience is blocked by pop-ups, you are effectively hanging up on the majority of your traffic.

The "Franken-Funnel":

I’ve seen SaaS companies rebrand their homepage, but leave their "Book a Demo" pages on old templates. If a prospect clicks "Demo" and lands on a page with 2022 branding, they lose trust instantly. You are paying for the click, but losing the conversion.

Inconsistency creates "cognitive dissonance." When a high-ticket buyer sees a disjointed brand, they subconsciously assume the product is disjointed too. You are unconsciously training your market to view you as a "tier 2" solution, forcing your sales team to work twice as hard to win trust.

Other areas to audit:

• Paid Media: You might be running Google or LinkedIn Ads pointing to landing pages that were relevant in Q1 but are obsolete in Q4. If you are paying $50+ per click to send traffic to a "404 Error" or an expired offer, you are lighting cash on fire. I’ve seen companies waste 15% of their monthly budget on broken URLs.
• Automation: Your ABM campaign generates a lead, but the HubSpot workflow fails to route it to the sales team because of a "State/Region" field error. Speed-to-lead is everything. If a high-intent demo request sits in a "System Error" bucket for 4 days, that lead is gone. You paid for the lead, but your automation threw it in the trash.

2. Risk. The Liability Traps

Where are you exposed to legal or security threats?

Ghost Users:

Audit your admin list. If you have ex-employees or old agency partners with "Admin" access to your CMS or social media accounts, you have a massive security hole waiting to be exploited.

According to the Verizon Data Breach Report, the use of stolen credentials is the #1 entry point for cyberattacks. An unmonitored ghost account allows attackers to bypass your firewalls using valid logins, often remaining undetected for months while they export your customer database.

The Accessibility Trap:

It’s easy to dismiss font colors and contrast as "design choices." But with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and updated ADA guidelines looming, low-contrast text is a legal vulnerability. 

The "Zombie" Cookie Banner:

Does your cookie banner actually block scripts before consent, or is it just decoration? Privacy regulators are moving from warnings to fines. Entering 2026 with a non-compliant banner is a risk you don't need to take.

Other areas to audit:

• Automation: Are you paying for 50,000 HubSpot contacts, but only marketing to 10,000? Marketing automation pricing is based on volume. If 40% of your database is "Hard Bounced," duplicate, or unengaged, you are paying a "lazy tax" on your software subscription every month.

3. Reputation. The Trust Eroders

Does your site signal "Growth" or "Stagnation"?

Broken Social Proof: 

If you feature a G2 or Capterra widget to build trust, but the widget is broken (showing a gray error box), it has the opposite effect. It looks like you have something to hide.

A broken review widget triggers the "Streisand Effect." Instead of seeing 5 stars, the visitor wonders, "Did they get banned? Did they lose their reviews?" A broken widget transforms your strongest asset (social proof) into a psychological red flag that forces users to question your legitimacy.

The "Past Tense" Team:

Nothing worries an investor or an Enterprise buyer more than a Team page featuring executives who left the company six months ago. It signals instability.

In the era of LinkedIn, your buyers will fact-check you. If your site claims a VP is still there, but their LinkedIn says they left in July, you instantly look disorganized or, worse, deceptive. This discrepancy alone can stall due diligence during funding rounds or enterprise vendor assessments.

The "Lorem Ipsum" Leak: 

It happens more than you think—a duplicated landing page that still has Latin filler text or placeholder images deep in the footer. It screams "vaporware."

Enterprise buyers use proxy metrics to judge your software. If your public-facing website lacks attention to detail (broken images, filler text), they assume your backend code is equally sloppy. You are looking unprofessional and signaling that your company lacks Enterprise Readiness.

Other areas to audit:

• Content: You pivoted your ICP to "Enterprise FinTech" in 2024, but your blog is still full of "Top 10 Tips for Small Retailers" articles from 2020. This is Positioning Sabotage. When your ideal customer lands on an article written for your old audience, they assume your product is too small or irrelevant for their needs. You aren't just attracting low-quality traffic; you are actively confusing the market about what you actually do today.
• SEO: A user searches your blog or resource center for a key topic and gets "No Results Found." Site searchers convert at 2x the rate of normal visitors. If your search bar is broken or your content isn't tagged correctly, you are blinding your best prospects.

The Solution: Delegate

The name of the game is 'focus'. Your job isn't to fix the CSS or update the plugins yourself. Your job is to ensure the liability is removed so you can focus on strategy.

To make this easy, I’ve compiled a "Forward-to-Marketing" delegation checklist.

Below is the comprehensive housekeeping checklist. I have organized this so you can copy/paste it directly into a project management ticket (Asana, Jira, Linear) for your Marketing Manager.

The "Forward-to-Marketing" Checklist

1. For the Growth Lead (Paid Media & Demand Gen)

• Ad Destination Audit: [ ] Check all active Google/LinkedIn Ad destination URLs. (Ensure you aren't paying for clicks to 404 pages).
• Waste Check: [ ] Review "Search Terms" report for negative keywords. (Stop paying for irrelevant clicks).
• ABM Hygiene: [ ] Audit Target Account Lists in your ABM tool (Terminus/6sense/LinkedIn). Ensure you aren't targeting current customers with "Top of Funnel" ads.
• Retargeting: [ ] Verify retargeting audiences exclude current customers.
• Pricing: [ ] Ensure pricing tiers on landing pages match the current Q4 sales deck.

2. For the RevOps/Admin (Automation & Data)

• The "Contact" Test: [ ] Submit a dummy lead on the "Contact Us" and "Demo" forms. Does the notification actually reach the Sales Rep?
• CRM Sync: [ ] Verify that the form data (Source, UTMs) is arriving correctly in HubSpot/Salesforce.
• Database Hygiene: [ ] Run a "Duplicate" scan on Contacts and Companies.
• Cost Savings: [ ] Archive "Hard Bounced" contacts to lower your marketing automation subscription costs.
• Ghost Users: [ ] Remove admin access for ex-employees and past agencies from HubSpot, Google Ads, and Social accounts.

3. For the Content & Brand Lead (Messaging & SEO)

• The "Franken-Brand" Check: [ ] Audit the top 10 landing pages against the Homepage. Do they all use the current logo, font, and footer?
• Positioning Refresh: [ ] Review high-traffic blog posts. Update old stats (e.g., change "in 2023" to "in 2025") and remove references to old ICPs.
• Team Page: [ ] Remove departed team members; add new key hires.
• Social Links: [ ] Remove footer links to social platforms you no longer actively manage (avoid the "Ghost Town" look).
• Search Bar: [ ] Test the site search bar. Ensure "Zero Results" pages provide helpful alternatives, not a dead end.

4. For the Web/Tech Lead (Performance & Security)

• Core Web Vitals: [ ] Target LCP under 2.5s and INP under 200ms. (Action: Compress hero images to WebP/AVIF).
• Mobile Usability: [ ] Verify that chatbots or cookie banners do not cover the "Submit" or "CTA" buttons on mobile screens.
• Compliance: [ ] Verify the Cookie Banner actually blocks scripts prior to consent (GDPR/CCPA).
• Broken Links: [ ] Crawl the site (Screaming Frog/Ahrefs) to fix internal 404s.
• Infrastructure: [ ] Check credit card expiration dates for Domain Registrars and DNS providers.
• Security: [ ] Update all plugins/CMS versions and verify SSL auto-renewal is active.

The goal isn't perfection—it's reliability. By addressing these areas now, you ensure that when you turn up the marketing spend in January, your engine is tuned to handle the load.

Don't have a Marketing Lead to hand this to? Contact us and let's discuss how we can get your growth engine audit-ready for 2026.