Do this on your phone, on mobile data rather than your own wifi, as if you had never seen the site before. Twenty minutes. Be unkind about it - a stranger will be.
The ten checks
It takes more than three seconds to show anything
Count it. Most people give a site a couple of seconds before going back to the results, and the ones who leave that fast never appear in any enquiry count. Slow is usually huge unoptimised images, and it is usually fixable in an afternoon.
You have to pinch and zoom to read it
The majority of visits to a small business site are on a phone. If the site was designed on a desktop and squeezed down afterwards, you can feel it immediately.
Your prices are nowhere
Whether or not you publish exact figures, a visitor needs some indication - a range, a "from", a starting point. No signal at all reads as expensive, and most people leave rather than ask.
Contacting you takes more than one tap
Phone number that does not dial when tapped, no WhatsApp button, a contact form as the only route. Every extra step loses a share of the people who were ready.
It does not say where you are
Surprisingly common. Area, address, or at minimum the places you serve - in text, on the page, not only inside a map embed.
The photos are not of your business
Stock images of a generic salon or a generic office. Customers recognise them instantly, and they undo the trust the rest of the page was building.
Something is visibly out of date
Christmas hours in August. A 2023 copyright line. An offer that has ended. Any one of these tells a visitor nobody is looking after the business.
Nothing tells the visitor what to do next
Every page should end with an obvious step - book, call, message, see prices. Pages that simply stop leave the visitor to decide, and mostly they decide to leave.
You cannot change anything yourself
If updating a price means emailing someone and waiting, your site will drift out of date. Not because you do not care - because it is friction, every time.
You do not know if anyone visits
No analytics at all means every decision about the site is a guess, including whether it is working. This is the one that makes the other nine invisible.
Which ones to fix first
They are not equal. If you can only do three things, do these, in this order.
- Make contacting you one tap, everywhere. This converts people you are already reaching, so it pays back fastest.
- Fix the speed. It affects every visitor and it affects your position in search, so it pays twice.
- Put some indication of price on the site. It costs nothing and it stops the silent leaving.
Design comes after all three. A beautiful site that is slow, priceless and hard to contact is a portfolio piece, not a business asset.
When patching stops making sense
There is a point where a rebuild is cheaper than another round of fixes, and it is usually reached earlier than people expect. The signals are structural: the site is built on something nobody supports any more, small changes keep breaking other things, it cannot be made fast because of how it was assembled, or the person who built it cannot be contacted.
Short of that, patching is genuinely the right answer, and we will say so. A free audit that ends in "fix these three things and keep the site" is a perfectly normal outcome of asking us to look.
A free website audit: what is slowing it down, what is losing enquiries, and whether it is worth rebuilding or fixing.
Have us run the check for you