Takes about five minutes. You do not need us to do any of it.
Most businesses never find out why an enquiry did not come. Somebody is given your name, they look you up before they ring, and what they see in those few seconds decides whether they call. If they do not, nothing tells you.
These are the six things we check first on any site. Run them on your own. If everything passes, your site is doing its job and you can stop reading.
Not your computer. Your phone, held the way you normally hold it.
Can you read the words without pinching to zoom in? If you cannot, neither can the person who was just given your name. Roughly everyone who looks up a local business now does it on a phone, so a site built for a desktop screen is a site most people never really read.
It should ring you. Nothing else.
On a lot of older sites the number is part of an image, or it is typed as plain text, so tapping it does nothing. The visitor then has to copy it out by hand, and a fair number simply will not bother. While you are there, check the number is still one you actually answer.
In the address bar, next to your domain.
A padlock means the site has an SSL certificate. No padlock means some browsers show a “Not secure” warning before your page even loads, which is a poor first impression for a business asking to be trusted with work. SSL is free to add and there is no good reason to be without it.
Type your business name and your town into Google.
Your own site should come up first. If what comes up instead is a directory listing, a Facebook page, or somebody else entirely, then the site is not doing the one job it definitely should do — being findable by people who already know your name.
Properly. As if you were a customer.
Then check the email actually arrives. This is the one that catches most businesses, because a broken contact form is completely silent. Nothing tells you it stopped working. The enquiries simply stop, and it can be months before anyone notices. If your form does not arrive, everything else on this list is academic.
The copyright line at the very bottom.
If it says a year that is not this one, that is the first thing a careful customer notices, and it quietly suggests nobody has looked at the site in a long while. It is a two-minute fix and it is worth doing today, whoever looks after your site.
All six pass. Your site is in good shape. Keep an eye on check five every few months, because forms break quietly and without warning.
One or two fail. These are usually small, cheap fixes. Whoever built the site can do them, and you should ask them to.
Three or more fail. The site is working against you rather than for you, and patching it one item at a time usually costs more than starting again.
Want to see what yours would look like rebuilt?
We design your homepage and send it to you before you pay anything. Your business name, your town, your words. Fixed prices are published on the site, so there is no quote to wait for.
