Most website problems are obvious once someone actually looks. The difficulty is that owners stop seeing their own site after a few months: you know where everything is, so you cannot tell that nobody else does.
This guide is a structured way to look at your own site as a stranger would. It takes an afternoon, costs nothing, and will give you a prioritised list rather than a vague sense that something is off.
- 1
Write down what each page is supposed to do
Open a spreadsheet, list every page, and write one sentence per page: what should someone do after reading this? If a page has no answer, it is either a candidate for deletion or it needs a purpose. Pages that exist only because they existed on the old site are the most common source of clutter.
- 2
Do the five-second test on your homepage
Show your homepage to someone unfamiliar with the business for five seconds, then hide it. Ask what the business does and where it is based. If they cannot answer both, the homepage is failing at its only real job. Do this with three people — one is an anecdote.
- 3
Go through the whole site on a phone
Not the desktop browser resized — an actual phone, on mobile data rather than wi-fi. Tap every button, fill in every form, read every block of text. Most sites are designed on a large screen and used on a small one. Note anything you have to pinch, zoom or hunt for.
- 4
Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages
Use pagespeed.web.dev. Look at the mobile scores and, more importantly, the Core Web Vitals assessment. Large uncompressed images are the single most common cause of a slow site and the easiest to fix. Ignore the vanity score and focus on the specific opportunities listed.
- 5
Check what actually happens in search
Search Google for your business name, then for the service you most want to be found for, with your town. Note where you appear and who is above you. Then search site:yourdomain.com to see which of your pages Google has actually indexed — missing pages are a real problem and a common one.
- 6
Find where people give up
In Google Analytics, look at landing pages by entrances and at where sessions end. A page with high entrances and almost no onward journey is either answering the question completely or failing to offer a next step. Read the page and decide which.
- 7
Sort the list by effort against impact
You will now have thirty things. Split them into quick fixes worth doing this week, structural problems worth planning properly, and things that only bother you. Most owners try to do all thirty and finish none. Do the first five.
What this will not tell you
An afternoon audit finds the obvious and the visible. It will not find technical issues in how the site is built, accessibility problems beyond the glaring ones, or whether the underlying structure can support where the business is going.
If the list you produce is mostly structural — pages that do not exist, journeys that do not join up, a content model that cannot hold what you need — that is usually a sign the site needs rethinking rather than patching.
Frequently asked questions
No. Google Analytics, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights are free and cover everything in this guide. Paid tools go deeper on competitor and keyword research, which is a separate exercise.
Would rather we did it?
These guides are here so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.
Start a conversation