This is one of the most reasonable questions a business owner can ask, and one of the hardest to get a straight answer to.
Ask a web designer and you’ll hear about the design. Ask an SEO and you’ll hear about rankings. Ask a friend and they’ll tell you it looks nice, because what else are they going to say?
Here’s the honest framing: a good website is one that gets found by the right people and then gets them to contact you. Everything else is decoration. Pretty is not a measure, modern is not a measure, enquiries are a measure.
So here are twelve checks you can do yourself in an afternoon. No tools, no jargon, nothing to buy. Be ruthless with yourself and you’ll know where you stand by teatime.
The five-second test
1. Can a stranger tell what you do and where, within five seconds?
Open your homepage on your phone. Look at only what’s visible before you scroll. Does it say what service you provide and which area you cover, in plain words?
If the biggest text says something like “Crafted With Care Since 2011” or “Excellence As Standard”, you’ve failed this one. Slogans feel like branding and read like nothing. “Emergency Plumber, Preston and surrounding villages” is not poetry but it wins every time.
2. Does your browser tab say something useful?
Look at the tab at the top of the window. If it says “Home” or “Welcome” or just your business name, that’s a wasted signal on every page of your site, and it’s one of the quickest wins there is.
The phone test
3. Is it usable on a phone, outdoors, on mobile data?
Not on your office wifi on a laptop. Outside, on 4G. Most of your customers are doing exactly that.
Count how long before you can read anything. Over three seconds is a problem, over six and you’re losing people in volume.
4. Can you contact the business in one tap from the top of any page?
Your phone number should be visible and tappable in the header of every page. Not buried on a contact page, not an image of a number, not a form only. Plenty of your customers never wanted to type anything.
5. Can you tap the form fields accurately with a thumb?
Try filling your own form in on your own phone. If the fields are tiny, if the keyboard covers what you’re typing, if it takes three attempts, that’s enquiries gone.
The trust test
6. Is there proof you’re real?
A stranger is deciding whether to give you their phone number. What on the page says you exist and you’re competent? Real photos of your own work, reviews, your actual address, your name, a face, how long you’ve been going.
Stock photos do the opposite of this. A homepage of immaculate stock interiors tells a visitor nothing except that you bought some photos.
7. Are your reviews on the page, or only on Google?
If you’ve earned good reviews, use them. Three specific ones, with names, beat a five-star graphic.
8. Does it give any indication of price?
Not a fixed quote. A range, or a starting-from figure. A page with no price signal at all makes people assume they can’t afford you and leave rather than ask.
The content test
9. Does each service have its own proper page?
If you offer six things and they’re six bullet points on one page, you’re asking one page to compete against businesses that each wrote a full page about one of those things. You lose that.
10. Does the page answer the questions a customer actually asks you?
Think about the last ten enquiry calls. What did people ask before committing? How much, how long, do you cover my area, what happens first, are you insured, can I see similar work.
If your website doesn’t answer those, every visitor has to ring you to find out, and most won’t bother.
The reality test
11. What does Google Search Console say?
This is the only one that needs a login, and it’s free. It tells you what people searched before they found you, and whether they clicked.
Two things to look for. Are the searches bringing you traffic the ones that mean someone wants to buy, or are they all idle questions? And is anything getting lots of impressions and almost no clicks, which means you’re appearing and being passed over?
If you haven’t got it set up, that’s a twenty-minute job and the most useful twenty minutes available to you.
12. Would you pick you?
Open your three main competitors in tabs alongside your own site. Read all four as a customer with a problem and no loyalty.
Who looks more trustworthy? Who’s clearer? Who has more reviews? Who’s easier to contact?
If you’d pick one of them, you have your answer, and it’s worth more than any audit I could sell you.
Scoring it honestly
Count your passes.
Ten or more. Your website is fine. If enquiries are still thin, the problem is upstream: not enough of the right people are finding you. That’s a visibility job, not a website job.
Six to nine. Normal, and there’s real money in the gap. The fixes are mostly an afternoon each.
Five or fewer. Your website is costing you work every week. Start with the phone number, the page titles and the form, because those are hours rather than weeks.
The mistake I see most
People redesign when they should have fixed.
A full rebuild is expensive, takes months, and carries a real risk of losing the rankings the old site had earned. And in most cases the things holding a site back were a page title, a missing phone number, a seven-second load time and no reviews. All fixable on the site you’ve already got.
So before anyone sells you a redesign, make them tell you specifically which of the twelve above the new site will fix, and why it can’t be fixed now. Sometimes the answer is genuinely that the site is beyond saving. Often it isn’t.
And the words for all this
The findability half of the list, the titles, the speed, the service pages, the Search Console data, is SEO, search engine optimisation. The other half, the trust signals, the form, the price information, is conversion. Two different jobs, often sold as one thing, and worth being able to tell apart when someone quotes you.
If you’d like a second opinion rather than your own, send me your business name and postcode and I’ll run you a free audit. I’ll go through the list on your site and tell you which ones you fail, in order of what they’re costing you. If it comes back mostly clean, I’ll tell you that and point you at the real problem instead.
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