What We'd Fix First on Your Website: A 20-Minute Audit You Can Do Yourself

You don't need a developer to work out whether your website is doing its job. Open it on your phone, on mobile data, and run five checks: what the first screen says, how long it takes to load, how many taps it takes to contact you, whether your service pages answer a customer's real questions, and what happens in the hour after somebody enquires.

This is roughly what we do at the start with every business. It rarely takes twenty minutes to find the problem. Usually it's obvious inside five, and it's almost never the thing the owner expected.

Run it yourself first. Sit somewhere you won't be interrupted, open your site on your phone rather than a laptop, and be honest about what you see. Most people look at their own website the way they look at their own front door, which is to say they stopped seeing it years ago.

1. Cover everything below the first screen

Load your home page and don't scroll. Read only what's on screen.

A stranger who has never heard of you should be able to answer three things from that screen alone: what you do, where you do it, and what happens next. If any of the three takes a scroll to find, you're losing people who never scrolled.

The usual failure is a headline about the business rather than the customer. "Established 2011. Quality workmanship, competitive prices" tells somebody nothing they can act on, and every competitor's site says the same. "Emergency plumber covering Portsmouth and Havant, usually with you the same day" tells them whether to ring.

While you're up there, check the town is on screen. A visitor deciding whether you cover them shouldn't have to hunt through a footer to find out.

2. Time the load, on mobile data

Turn wifi off. Close the site, then open it again fresh and count.

Anything past about three seconds and you're losing a meaningful share of visitors before they've seen a word. It's a quiet loss, because those people never appear anywhere in your enquiries and never tell you why they left. Most trade sites that feel slow are slow for the same reason: enormous photographs straight off a phone, uploaded at full size.

Google's PageSpeed Insights will give you a proper score for free if you want the detail, but the phone test tells you most of what you need. If it feels sluggish to you, on your own site, that you're rooting for, imagine how it feels to somebody with three other tabs open.

3. Count the taps to reach you

From the home page, count how many taps it takes to get your phone number into a dialler. Then do it again from a service page, and again from a blog post.

One tap is the target, and two is acceptable. If the answer is three or more anywhere on the site, that's a straightforward fix and usually the highest-value twenty minutes you'll spend.

Then look at your form. Every field you ask for costs you enquiries, and most trade forms ask for things nobody needs at that stage. Name, a way to reach them, and roughly what they need doing is plenty. You can ask everything else once they're talking to you.

4. Read a service page as a stranger would

Pick your most profitable service and read its page as though you've never met yourself.

The most common gap we find is not bad writing. It's missing information. The page describes the service in general terms but never answers the questions a customer is actually weighing up: what it costs or what it depends on, how long it takes, whether the mess gets cleared afterwards, whether you're insured and qualified, what happens if something goes wrong.

People can't decide without those answers, so they either ring to ask, which you may not pick up, or they go to whichever competitor already answered on the page. Being cagey about price feels safer than it is. A range with an honest explanation of what moves it usually wins more work than silence, and it puts off the people who were only ever going to haggle.

Check the photos too. Real jobs you've done beat stock images every time, and a customer can tell the difference immediately.

5. Work out what happens in the next hour

This is the check almost nobody runs, and it's the one that costs the most.

Send yourself an enquiry through your own form. Then leave it, and see what happens. Does anything reach the customer straight away, or does it land in an inbox to be dealt with tonight? If you'd rung instead of filling in the form, would anything have come back?

A site that generates enquiries you don't respond to quickly is a site that generates enquiries for somebody else. We've written separately about what missed calls cost a trade business, and the same applies to forms. The follow-up is the part we usually end up building, because it's the part that's almost never there.

If you'd rather have someone go through this with you properly, that's what our website design work starts with, and we cover trades across Sussex and Hampshire.

Common questions

My website looks fine. Isn't that enough? Looking good and working are separate things. Plenty of attractive sites never ask the visitor for anything, and plenty of plain ones book work all day. If you're getting visitors and few enquiries, the problem is usually structure and follow-up rather than design.

How do I know how many visitors I'm getting? If nothing is installed, you don't, and that's worth fixing before anything else. Google Analytics is free and takes an afternoon. Without it you're guessing at which of these problems you actually have.

Should I rebuild or fix what I've got? Fix first. Work through the five checks above, give it a month, and see what changes. If the site is slow, hard to edit and fights you every time you touch it, that's when a rebuild starts paying for itself.

How often should I look at this? Twice a year is plenty, plus any time you add a service or change the area you cover. Both tend to leave the website out of date without anybody noticing.

What if I do all this and still get nothing? Then the problem is upstream, and nobody is finding you in the first place. That's a search and visibility question rather than a website one, and it's worth reading why websites stop generating leads next.

Want a second pair of eyes on it?

Run the five checks first. You'll find at least one thing, and fixing it costs you nothing but an evening.

If you'd like us to go through it properly and tell you straight what we'd change, fill in the form here. Sussex, Hampshire, or anywhere nearby.