How Many Pages Should an Accessibility Audit Cover?
The honest answer is that page count is the wrong unit. A 2,000-product store might be adequately represented by fifteen pages, while a fifty-page site with fifty bespoke layouts needs all fifty. What matters is how many distinct templates you have, and whether you covered the paths where failure actually costs something.
Count templates, not pages
On any CMS or e-commerce platform, most pages are the same handful of templates filled with different content. An online store with 1,800 products typically has one product template. Every one of those pages shares the same heading structure, the same button markup, the same image handling.
The practical consequence is enormous leverage: a contrast failure in the product template is one fix that resolves 1,800 pages. It also means scanning 200 product pages tells you almost nothing that scanning two would not.
A typical Shopify or WordPress site has somewhere between eight and twenty distinct templates:
- Home
- Category / collection listing
- Product or article detail
- Search results (including the empty state)
- Cart and checkout
- Account, login and registration
- Contact or enquiry form
- Blog index and blog post
- Static pages — about, policies, FAQ
- 404 and error states
Then add the pages that carry consequences
Template coverage finds mechanical problems. It does not guarantee you covered the places where a failure actually matters. Add every page in a path where someone:
- Spends money
- Submits an application or a form
- Books, registers or enrols
- Accesses something legally required — a policy, a notice, a fee schedule
- Contacts you to report a problem, including your accessibility statement itself
These are also the pages most likely to be cited in a complaint, because they are where a barrier stops a person doing the thing they came to do.
So what is the number?
For most organisations, a defensible sample looks like:
- Small brochure site (under 50 pages): every page. It is cheap and removes the argument.
- Typical business or e-commerce site: 15–30 pages — every template, plus the full checkout or enquiry path.
- Large content site or store: 30–60 pages — every template, both logged-in and logged-out states, plus the transactional paths.
- University or government domain: template coverage per sub-site, plus continuous monitoring. A fixed sample of a 50,000-page domain is obsolete on delivery.
Two states people forget
Logged in. Account dashboards, order history and saved details are frequently older and less designed than the public site, and scanners cannot reach them without a session.
Error and empty states. A form with validation errors showing is a different page from an empty form, and it is where screen-reader users most often get stranded — the error is displayed visually and never announced.
Frequency beats depth
A thirty-page scan every week is worth more than a three-hundred-page audit once a year. Sites regress: a marketing team adds a hero banner with pale text, a developer swaps a button for a styled div, a plugin update changes the focus order.
The value of continuous monitoring is not the report you get on a normal day, when nothing has changed. It is that you find out within a day on the one occasion something breaks — and that you accumulate a dated record showing you were paying attention, which is the most useful artefact you can have if anyone asks.
See how many pages your site has
A free scan reports how many pages are linked from the one you check.
Scan multiple pages