Most "best free UX tools" lists have a problem: half the tools on them aren't actually free, they're paid tools with a token free trial dressed up as free. The other half are genuinely free but the article never tells you what to actually do with them once installed.
This is a shorter list than most, on purpose. Four tools, each one genuinely free with no catch, each one covering different ground. Install all four and you'll have real data behind your DIY UX audit within a week.
I've deliberately left tools off this list that don't earn their place. No enterprise platforms with a "free trial" that expires in 14 days. No tools that are free in name but useless without a paid add-on to see the data that actually matters. Everything below is free indefinitely, for real, and I use versions of at least three of these four on my own paid audits.
Free download, no email required
Grab the 5-Minute Conversion Check -- a free one-page PDF checklist to run once you've got these tools installed.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is the one tool on this list I'd tell anyone to install today, no caveats. It's completely free, with no session cap and no paid tier at all -- Microsoft monetises the aggregated, anonymised data rather than charging you for it, which is worth knowing but doesn't change what you get.
Compare that to Hotjar, now part of Contentsquare, whose free tier caps you at 35 recorded sessions a day. If you've got any meaningful traffic, you'll burn through that cap before lunch. Clarity has no such limit.
What you get: heatmaps showing where people click and scroll, full session recordings so you can watch real visitors move through your site, and rage click detection that flags anywhere people are repeatedly clicking something that isn't responding. Install it, leave it running for a week, then watch ten recordings on mobile before you watch any on desktop. Mobile is where most of the friction lives and where most DIY reviews forget to look first.
One setup tip that saves a lot of wasted watching: filter recordings by page before you start, rather than watching whatever the tool serves up first. Ten recordings of your checkout page tell you far more than ten recordings spread randomly across your whole site.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights takes a URL and gives you back a Core Web Vitals score in under a minute, split by mobile and desktop. Always check the mobile score first. It's almost always worse, and it's where the bulk of your traffic is arriving from.
The report also gives you specific opportunities: which images are too large, which scripts are blocking rendering, what's delaying your largest visible element from appearing. You don't need to understand the technical detail to act on it -- hand the report to a developer and ask them to work through the top three flagged issues.
One thing this tool won't tell you: whether a slow page is actually costing you conversions, or just costing you patience. For that you need behavioural data, which is why Clarity and PageSpeed work better together than either does alone.
GA4
GA4 earns its reputation for being confusing, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But if you've already got it installed and collecting data, two things are worth digging out: your device breakdown, and your highest-exit pages.
The device breakdown report will show you whether mobile visitors convert at a noticeably lower rate than desktop visitors. If they do, that's one of the clearest signals available that your mobile experience has a specific, fixable problem rather than just being generally worse.
Exit pages take more digging in GA4's standard reports, but they're worth the effort. A page with unusually high exits partway through your funnel is telling you exactly where visitors are giving up. If you haven't set up conversion tracking yet, treat that as the first job -- you can't diagnose a problem you're not measuring in the first place.
If GA4's interface has you stuck before you've even found the report you need, you're not alone -- it's genuinely one of the least intuitive parts of running a small business website, and it's worth budgeting more patience for it than the other three tools here combined.
WAVE
WAVE, from WebAIM, is a free accessibility checker you can run against any URL or install as a browser extension. It flags missing alt text, poor colour contrast, form fields without labels, and structural heading problems.
Accessibility issues don't show up in session recordings the way a broken button does, but they affect a real proportion of your visitors, and several of the things WAVE flags -- contrast, labelling, heading structure -- overlap directly with basic usability for everyone, not just visitors using assistive technology. Run it on your three most important pages. Most sites fail on at least one contrast issue the first time.
WAVE won't tell you whether your site is legally compliant with accessibility regulations in your market, and it won't catch every issue a full manual audit would. But as a free first pass, it catches a genuinely useful share of the most common problems, and it takes about two minutes per page.
Which to install first, if you can only do one thing today
Microsoft Clarity. Of the four tools here, it's the one that gives you the richest picture for the least setup effort, and it's the one most DIY reviews skip in favour of pure analytics.
A sensible order for the rest of the week: install Clarity on day one and let it start collecting. Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages on day two -- it takes minutes and needs no setup at all. Pull your GA4 device breakdown by day three or four, once Clarity has enough sessions to be worth cross-referencing against. Run WAVE last, once you've fixed anything Clarity and PageSpeed flagged, since layout changes can shift where contrast or labelling issues sit on the page.
By the end of the week you'll have behavioural evidence, performance data, conversion-by-device data, and an accessibility pass -- all from tools that cost nothing.
That's a genuinely strong starting position. Most businesses I audit have never looked at more than one of these four data sources at once, which means they're making decisions based on a fraction of the evidence that's freely available to them.
The honest limit of free tools
All four of these tools are genuinely useful, and none of them cost anything. But they share the same limitation.
"Free tools show you what's happening. They don't tell you why, and they definitely don't tell you which of the ten problems you've now found is actually costing you the most money. That gap is where expert judgement, or a structured methodology, has to do the rest of the work."
Alice, No-Friction Lab
That's not a sales pitch dressed up as an insight -- it's the actual reason a DIY review and a professional audit produce different outputs from similar raw material. The tools above will hand you a pile of genuine, real findings. What you do with that pile is the harder part.
If you want a structured way to work through what these tools surface, the DIY Toolkit includes a prioritisation matrix built for exactly this. If you'd rather hand the whole thing over, a professional audit starts at £99.
Three ways to take this further
Start free, go deeper when you're ready. The 5-Minute Conversion Check is a free one-page PDF. The Toolkit is the structured self-serve version at £49.99. The Audit is the fully done-for-you version from £99.
About the author
Alice
Founder, No-Friction Lab
Alice brings 10+ years of hands-on UX, CRO, and experimentation experience across Sky, Stowe Family Law, B2B ecommerce, and professional services. She's run large-scale experimentation programmes from scratch and squeezed meaningful results from minimal budgets.
That breadth of context is what makes the audits different: every finding is reviewed by someone who's seen what actually moves the needle, not just what the textbook says should.