The 5-Point Website Audit I Run on Every Client Site

Before I change a single thing on a client's website, I run it through the same audit. Every time.

Not because I love checklists (okay, I do), but because guessing is expensive. When someone pays me to fix their website, they deserve to know exactly what's broken and why — before I touch anything.

Here's the full 5-point version

First Impression

You have about three seconds.

That's how long a visitor gives your site before deciding to stay or leave. In those three seconds, your homepage needs to answer two questions: what do you do, and who is it for?

What I check: I load the homepage fresh and read only what's visible without scrolling. If I can't tell what the business does in one glance, that's problem number one.

What I usually find: a beautiful hero image with a vague headline. "Welcome to our website." "Quality you can trust." That could be a plumber or a bakery. Your headline should do the heavy lifting — say what you do, plainly.

Mobile Check

Over 60% of your visitors are on their phone. If your site was designed on a desktop and never checked on mobile, you're losing them.

What I check: I pull the site up on my phone and tap through everything. Every button, every menu item, every form. I'm looking for text I have to pinch to read, buttons too close together to tap, and menus that don't open.

What I usually find: a site that looks great on a laptop and falls apart on a phone. This is the single most common issue I see, and it's the easiest to miss — because business owners always check their own site on their computer.

Clear Next Step

Every page needs one obvious action. Book a call. Fill out the form. Buy the thing. One.

What I check: on each main page, I ask — if I landed here from Google, would I know what to do next? Is there one clear button, or five competing ones?

What I usually find: either no call to action at all (the site just... ends) or too many. "Call now! Email us! Follow us! Read our blog! Sign up!" When everything is the priority, nothing is.

Trust Signals

People buy from businesses they trust. Your website has to earn that trust fast, especially if you're a small business competing with bigger names.

What I check: real reviews, real photos of real humans, an about page with a face on it. I look for anything that proves there are actual people behind the business.

What I usually find: stock photos, no reviews anywhere, and an about page that says "we" without ever showing who "we" is. Put your face on your website. It matters more than any design trend.

Speed

If your site takes more than three seconds to load, a chunk of your visitors are already gone. They didn't bounce because your content was bad — they never saw it.

What I check: load time on both desktop and mobile, and what's causing the slowdown. Nine times out of ten, it's images — massive, uncompressed files that nobody resized before uploading.

What I usually find: this one hits close to home, because my own site had the same problem. I ended up compressing a dozen images and cutting about 24 MB before mine loaded the way it should. Fix your images first; it's the fastest win on this list.

What Your Score Means

If your site passed all five — honestly, you're ahead of most small business websites I've seen.

If it didn't, that's normal. Most don't. And now you know exactly where to start instead of staring at your homepage wondering what's wrong with it.

Or skip the homework: I'm offering free website audits right now. I'll run your site through this same checklist and send you my top fixes — no strings attached.