A teardown is the best cold email you will ever send.
Nobody replies to “I build websites”. They reply to somebody who has clearly already looked at theirs and can prove it.
01Why a teardown beats a pitch
A pitch says what you can do. A teardown shows you already did it. By the time the prospect finishes reading, you have demonstrated the thing you were going to charge them to find out, and the question has quietly moved from whether to hire someone to whether to hire you.
The catch has always been the hours. Doing one properly means measuring a site, writing it up, and making it look like something worth reading, for somebody who has not paid you and might not reply. This does the measuring and the writing up.
02Measured facts, kept apart from opinion
The report never blurs the two. A contrast ratio that fails WCAG is a fact and is written as one, with the number attached. Your read on the positioning is an opinion and is written in your voice, in the first person, and labelled as yours.
That separation is what makes it credible. A document where everything is asserted with equal confidence reads as a sales trick, and prospects have seen enough of those.
03What comes out
A PDF prepared by you, with an executive summary, the findings that serve your objective, screenshots you can mark up, a redesign direction if you wrote one, and a closing in your own words. Plus a short outreach email, under 140 words, built around the single biggest finding.
Prefer the measurements without the report? The website audit tool is the same engine. Need the assets off a page instead, the website downloader has them.
04Questions people ask
What is a website teardown?
A teardown is a structured critique of a live website: what is working, what is costing the business money, and what to change first. Freelancers and agencies use them as the opening move with a prospect, because a specific critique of someone's own site is far harder to ignore than a generic pitch.
How do I do a website teardown?
Paste the prospect's URL. pagehaul measures the design, speed, mobile, SEO and conversion signals, then hands you the findings. You add what only a human can see, and it writes the whole thing up as a report you can send.
Can I use a teardown to win clients?
That is what it is built for. Every teardown comes with a short outreach email written around the biggest finding, so the report has something to arrive attached to.
Is the teardown free?
Every account gets 2 free teardowns, complete with the report and the PDF. No card up front.
Does it work on any website?
Any page that a browser can open. Sites behind a login or a hard bot wall will return less, and the report says exactly what could not be reached rather than inventing it.
Paste a prospect's link and get a report you can send.
Tear down a site free