The seven things we check on every website
The exact checklist we run on every site we look at. Score your own website on all seven and you will find the leaks costing you customers.
Every time we look at a business website, we run the same seven checks. It takes about ten minutes and it finds most of the money.
You can do it on your own site right now. Be brutal. Score each one Good, Needs work, or Failing.
1. Does it look trustworthy in three seconds?
Open your homepage on a phone and count to three, then look away. What did you take in?
People decide whether you are credible almost instantly, and mostly on feel: is it modern, is it clean, does it look like someone cared. Fair or not, a dated website makes people quietly assume the business behind it is dated too.
Failing looks like: stock photos of handshakes, a 2014 layout, three different fonts, a logo saved as a blurry JPEG.
2. Does it actually work on a phone?
Most of your visitors are on a phone. Not most-ish. Most.
Open your site on your own phone and try to do the main thing a customer would do. Not skim it, do it. Find your prices. Call you. Fill in the form.
Failing looks like: pinching to zoom, text running off the edge, buttons too small to hit, a menu that does not open.
3. Does it load fast?
Count the seconds from tap to usable. If it is more than about three, you are losing people, and the ones you lose are gone silently.
The usual culprit is enormous images. A photo straight off a phone camera can be 6MB. It should be under 200KB.
Failing looks like: a white screen, then a long pause, then everything jumping around as it loads.
4. Can a stranger tell what you do in five seconds?
Show your homepage to someone who knows nothing about your business. Five seconds. Then ask them what you do and who you do it for.
If they hesitate, your headline is doing nothing. Most homepages open with something like “Welcome to our website” or “Quality solutions since 2011,” which tells a visitor precisely nothing.
Good looks like: plain words that say what you do, who for, and where.
5. Is it stupidly easy to contact you?
On a phone, your number should be one tap. Not typed out as text, not baked into an image, and definitely not hiding on a contact page two clicks away.
This one is boring and it is probably the single most expensive mistake on this list. We have seen businesses lose real jobs because a customer with a problem right now could not be bothered to copy a number across.
Failing looks like: contact details only on the contact page, a phone number as an image, a form that never gets checked.
6. Is there any proof you are any good?
Reviews. Real photos of your actual team and your actual work. Names. Faces. Logos of businesses you have worked with.
Anyone can claim to be professional and reliable on their own website. Proof is the only thing that makes a stranger believe it, and most sites have none of it.
Failing looks like: stock imagery, zero reviews on the site, no faces anywhere, vague claims with nothing behind them.
7. Do you turn up on Google?
Open a private browsing window and search the way a customer would. Not your business name, they already know that. Search the thing you do plus your area. “Plumber in Faerie Glen.” “Accountant Pretoria east.”
Then check your Google Business Profile. Is it complete? Photos? Recent reviews? Correct hours?
Failing looks like: nowhere on page one, and a Google profile you set up once in 2021 and never touched again.
What to do with your score
Add it up honestly. Most small business websites we look at fail three or four of these.
That is actually good news, because these are not deep mysterious problems. They are leaks. Fixing the phone number one alone can pay for itself in a week.
Start with the cheapest, highest impact ones: tap to call, your Google profile, and compressing your images. You can do all three yourself this week.
Or let us do it for you
If you would rather someone else looked with fresh eyes, we do this as a free website check. We run all seven checks on your site, pick the three biggest problems, and send you a short honest report on what each one is costing you and what we would fix first.
No charge, no catch, and you keep the report whether you work with us or not.