The first thing to understand about any audit report is that length does not equal severity. A report with fifty findings doesn't mean your website is broken beyond repair — it means the audit was thorough. Most of those fifty findings will be minor or informational. What matters is knowing how to identify the few issues that are actually urgent.
Start with the summary, not the details
A well-structured audit report will have an executive summary at the beginning that distills the most important findings. Start there. Read the summary before you read anything else. It will tell you the overall health of the site, the most critical issues, and the key areas of concern. If your report doesn't have a summary, look for the highest-severity findings across each section — those are your equivalent.
Understand the severity levels
Audit reports typically label findings as critical, high, medium, or low severity — or use similar language. Critical issues are ones that are actively breaking something or causing immediate harm: a non-functional donation form, a page that returns an error, a security problem. High-severity issues are important but not emergency-level. Medium and low issues are worth addressing eventually but don't need immediate attention.
Focus your first read on critical and high-severity findings only. Read the others only after you've made a plan for the important ones.
Read each finding for what it means, not just what it is
A finding like "missing alt text on 47 images" is a fact. What matters is what that means: visitors using screen readers can't understand those images, which is an accessibility failure that affects a portion of your audience and may create legal risk. Understanding the consequence of each finding helps you judge how urgently it needs to be fixed relative to your organization's priorities.
If a finding's consequence is unclear from the report, that's a gap in the report — a good audit should explain why each issue matters, not just identify that it exists.
GoodSiteReport audit reports are written in plain language specifically so nonprofit staff can read them without a technical background. Every finding includes a plain-English explanation of what it means and what to do about it.
Group findings by who can fix them
Some findings require a developer. Others can be handled by any staff member with access to the CMS. Separating findings into these two buckets immediately makes the report more manageable. Your team can start working on the non-technical fixes right away — updating content, adding alt text, improving calls to action — while technical items are queued for a developer or contractor.
Create a three-column action list
After your first read, create a simple three-column list: Fix Now (critical and high severity), Fix Soon (medium severity with clear impact), and Fix Eventually (low severity or informational). Assign an owner and a rough timeline to each item in the Fix Now column. This turns the report from a document into a project.
You don't need to fix everything at once. The goal is to stop the most damaging problems immediately, work through the significant ones over the following weeks, and address the minor ones as capacity allows.