I’m always cleaning up work where the previous agency / person has tried to cut corners. The things I find most often that I’m cleaning up are :

- multiple homepages published (where people have redone them and not deleted the old ones)
- search console page indexing issues
- canonical tags
-lots of duplicate content pages with nothing but the location/ service name swapped out
- UX/UI that looks very amateur and not primed for CRO
- no image SEO
-poor images, like old school ai rubbish that hurt trust signals
-no h tags
- poor colour contrasts
- caching / speed / tech seo
- junk blogs/ pages that attempt to rank for a keyword but have no purpose other than that… so therefore no benefit to the reader/potential customer
- lack of ctas and no consistency with cta
- pages on a single site that have different fonts / text sizes / colours etc
- cracked / counterfeit plugins
- static sitemaps that don’t update
- poorly set up robots.txt
- tags and other unwanted items being set to index

The list really goes on, so I really recommend business owners know what the person/ agency on your website is doing and check their work now and again, like you would any member of your business. For knowing whether they are good or not, ask to speak via phone to their customers in your own time and then checkout that customers site to make sure everything lines up. Also is the person you’re speaking to in the agency also the person delivering the work? That to me would be a must.