No tools to buy, no cost, no sign-up. Grab a coffee and run this on your own site. If you trade around Faringdon, Oxford or Swindon, it is the quickest way to see what is quietly costing you customers.
You do not need to be technical to do this. Open your website on your phone, not your computer, because that is how most of your customers will see it. Have a notepad next to you and give each of the twelve checks a simple pass or fail. At the end you will have an honest picture of where you stand and a short list of what to fix first.
Turn your wifi off and open your site on mobile data. Count the seconds until you can read and tap things. If it is more than three, you are losing visitors before they have seen anything. People do not wait around, they go back to Google and tap the next result. Speed is the single most common problem we see on small business sites, usually caused by huge images and bloated page builders.
More than half of local searches happen on a phone. Scroll through every page. Is the text big enough to read without pinching? Do buttons sit where your thumb can reach them? Does anything run off the side of the screen? A site that was clearly designed for a desktop and squashed onto mobile feels broken, and people treat it that way.
On your phone, try tapping your phone number. Does it offer to call? If it is just text, you are making a customer copy it out, which a lot of them will not bother to do. The same goes for your email and your address, which should open maps when tapped.
Look at each page and ask what you want the visitor to do next. Call you, book, get a quote, come in. If a page does not make that obvious, it is a dead end. Every page should gently push towards one clear action.
Check your website, your Google listing, your Facebook page and any directories you are on. The business name, address, phone number and opening hours should match exactly, down to the punctuation. When they do not, Google gets less confident about you and shows you less. This is dull and it matters more than almost anything else for local search.
Open a private browser window and search for what you do plus your town, for example "electrician Faringdon" or "hairdresser Witney". Are you on the first page? On the map? If you are nowhere, that is the gap. If you do not even have a Google Business Profile, that is the first thing to sort, and it is free.
Read your homepage as if you had never heard of the business. Within a few seconds, is it obvious what you sell and which area you cover? A surprising number of sites are so keen to sound impressive that they forget to say the simple thing. Plain beats clever.
Look at the address bar. Does it start with https and show a little padlock? If it says "Not secure", browsers will warn visitors away and Google will mark you down. A security certificate is usually free, so there is no excuse for going without one.
Stock photos of strangers shaking hands fool nobody. Real photos of your work, your premises, your team and your area build trust instantly. If your only photos are blurry or five years out of date, that is worth fixing, and it costs nothing but an afternoon with a phone camera.
Reviews, testimonials, before and after photos, logos of places you have worked with, numbers of jobs done. People trust other people. A site with no proof asks the visitor to take a complete leap of faith, and most will not.
Look for a copyright year in the footer or a blog with a last post from 2021. Out of date signals are quietly damaging. They make people wonder if you are even still trading. If nothing has changed in years, the site is working against you.
Think about the three questions customers ask you most often. Pricing, areas covered, how soon you can come out. Are the answers on the site? If not, you are forcing people to phone just to find out the basics, and the impatient ones will phone someone else instead. This also happens to be how you start showing up in AI search tools like ChatGPT, which pull plain answers straight off well written pages.
Count your passes. Ten or more and you are in good shape, focus on the gaps. Six to nine and there is real money being left on the table, worth fixing properly. Five or fewer and your website is more likely losing you customers than winning them, and a rebuild will usually pay for itself faster than you would think.
Do not try to fix everything at once. Pick the two checks you failed that touch the most customers, usually speed, mobile and being findable on Google, and sort those first. The rest can follow. If the honest answer is that the site needs replacing rather than patching, that is worth knowing too. A clean, fast five page site built properly starts at £1,499 and goes live in about a week, and unlike a patch it sets you up for the next few years.
Either way, the twenty minutes you just spent is the most useful thing most owners never do. The businesses that win locally are rarely the biggest. They are the ones whose website does the quiet basics right.
We will run the full health check and send back a short, honest list of what to fix first. Based near Faringdon, serving Oxfordshire, Swindon and the Cotswolds.
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