SRA website audit or continuous monitoring? An honest comparison
Both are legitimate ways to check your site against the SRA Transparency Rules. They answer different questions: an audit tells you where you stood on one day; monitoring tells you where you stand every week — and can prove it later.
Side by side
| One-off audit (consultant) | Continuous monitoring (FirmProof) | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A written report describing your site on one date | Weekly automated checks with dated findings, ongoing |
| Typical cost | £100–£2,500 one-off (market rates vary widely) | £39/month |
| Coverage in time | Point-in-time — accurate the day it's written | Continuous — each week's state is checked and recorded |
| Catches drift after site edits | No — a change the day after the audit goes unnoticed | Yes — regressions on previously passing checks are flagged that week |
| Evidence history | One document | 12-month dated history of every scan, finding and fix |
| Re-check after you fix something | Usually a new engagement | Instant re-scan included |
| Tracks changes to the SRA's own rules | No — frozen at the audit date | Yes — rule-source changes are flagged and affected checks re-run |
| Human judgement and tailored advice | Yes — a consultant can weigh context and advise | Partly — judgement calls are labelled “Review needed” for a human, and no advice is given |
| Depth on one day | Can go deeper than any automated check | Bounded by what automated checks can verify |
Audit prices reflect the observed market range for SRA website compliance reviews; scope varies from a template checklist to genuine bespoke review, which is much of why the range is so wide.
When a one-off audit is the right call
We sell monitoring, so read this section as the honest part. A consultant audit is the better tool when you need human judgement applied to your specific circumstances: a pre-merger review, an SRA engagement already under way, pricing structures too unusual for pattern-based checks, or a first-time build where someone should think about your wording rather than verify its presence. A good consultant can also review things no automated check can — tone, accuracy of legal claims, whether your published prices are commercially sensible.
The two also combine well: an audit to get the content right once, monitoring to make sure it stays that way. What an audit cannot do — at any price — is notice that a theme update deleted your SRA badge three weeks after the report was delivered.
Why point-in-time checking ages badly
The SRA's 2021 sampling found that up to two-thirds of firms declaring compliance were not fully compliant when their sites were actually checked — most of them presumably believed their last review. Websites change continuously: plugins update, pages get rewritten, calculators break. A monitoring approach treats that churn as the normal case, re-checking the live pages weekly and recording what was found, so the answer to “when did this break?” is a date in your history rather than a guess.
Every FirmProof result is an automated monitoring check, not a certification — “Clear” means no issue was detected by that check. Findings that need human judgement are labelled for review, which is exactly where a consultant, your COLP or your web agency comes back in.
Try the monitoring approach on your site now
The free scan runs three checks against your live pages in about a minute — the same engine the weekly monitor uses. If it finds nothing, you've lost a minute; if it finds something, you found it before anyone else did.
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