How to check whether your website is any good
A checklist you can run yourself in twenty minutes, with no technical knowledge and no tools you have to pay for.
You do not need a developer to tell you whether your website is working. Most of what matters can be checked by you, in about twenty minutes, on a phone.
Work through this in order. The early items catch the most damage.
Part one: on your phone, on mobile data
Turn your wifi off first. This matters — your own wifi hides the problem your customers have.
Does it load in under three seconds? Count. If you are still waiting at five, that is costing you visitors.
Can you read it without zooming? Text should be comfortably legible immediately. Pinching to read is a fail.
Can you tap the phone number and have it dial? For any business that takes calls, this is the single highest-value item on the list, and it is missing more often than you would believe.
Is the main thing you do visible without scrolling? Not your logo — the sentence that says what you do and where.
Do buttons work under a thumb? Small links crowded together get mis-tapped and people give up.
Part two: the four facts test
Give your homepage to someone who does not know your business. Ask them to find, in under ten seconds:
- What you do
- Where you are, or what area you cover
- What it roughly costs
- How to get in touch
If any takes longer than ten seconds, that is a fix — and it is a copy-and-layout fix, not a technical one. This test finds more real problems than everything else on this page combined.
Part three: being findable
Search your business name. Do you come up first? If not, and it is not a name collision, something is wrong.
Search what you do plus your town. Where are you? If the answer is nowhere, that is normal for a new site and worth working on.
Do you have a Google Business Profile? Search your name and look for the panel on the right with your hours and reviews. If it is not there, set one up — it is free, and it is what answers "near me". For a local business it is worth more than the website.
Check your details are right in it. Wrong opening hours there costs you more than almost anything on your actual site.
Part four: two free tools
PageSpeed Insights. Enter your address. Read the mobile score. Under 50 is a real problem, 50–89 has room to improve, 90+ is fine. The list underneath names the specific causes.
Google Search Console. More setup — you have to verify you own the site — but it tells you what people searched to reach you and which pages have problems. If you only ever use one tool, use this one.
Part five: things that quietly rot
These are the failures nobody notices until a customer mentions it.
Is your contact form actually arriving? Send yourself one. Then check the spam folder. Forms break silently and can be broken for months.
Are your opening hours right? Including holidays.
Are your prices current? A price a year out of date is worse than no price.
Do all your links work? Especially any menu or price list in a PDF.
Is there a padlock in the address bar? No padlock, or a warning, means your certificate has lapsed and browsers are actively warning people away.
Is anything on there factually wrong? Staff who left, services you stopped offering, an address you moved from.
Part six: the honest look
Open it next to two competitors on the same screen.
Not to judge the design — to ask which one you would call. That instinct is what your customers use, and you already have it.
Then ask what your site gets wrong that the other two get right. Usually it is not prettiness. It is that they say what it costs, or their photos are real, or their phone number is right there.
What to do with the results
Fix in this order:
- Anything factually wrong.
- Anything broken — forms, links, the certificate.
- Tap-to-call and the four facts.
- Speed.
- Design.
Design is last on purpose. A plain site that loads fast, tells the truth and makes it easy to call you outperforms a beautiful one that does not, every time.
If you work through this and conclude the site needs replacing rather than repairing, that is what we do — $499 to build, $49 a month to keep it in the state this checklist describes.