Website audit checklist: 10 checks in 20 minutes

Most business owners review their website asking the wrong question: does it look good?

That question has no useful answer. Your website isn't there to impress you. It's there so a stranger with money in hand can do three things: find you, understand you, and contact you. If any one of the three fails, nothing else matters.

This is a 20-minute audit with 10 checks. No coding, nothing to buy, no need to call your web designer. Every check has a clear pass or fail rule, no gray areas.

And at the end there's something more important than the list itself: the order in which you should fix what you find. It is not the order in which you check it, and that's exactly where most businesses lose money.

Before you start

Get three things ready:

• Your phone, not your computer. Most visits to a local business come from mobile. Auditing on a big screen shows you a picture your customers never see.
• An incognito window. Your regular browser knows who you are and shows you a falsely optimistic version of everything.
• A sheet with numbers 1 to 10. You'll mark each check pass or fail. No "sort of."

Start the timer.

Can they find you? (5 minutes)

Check 1: Does your site exist for Google?

Open Google and type this exactly, with your domain: site:yourdomain.com

Google will show every page of your site it has stored.

You fail if: no results appear, far fewer pages show up than you actually have, or you see strange pages you never created, a classic sign of a hacked site or a badly configured template.

What to do: if nothing shows up, your site is invisible to Google and no other improvement matters until that's fixed. Register the site in Google Search Console, which is free, and submit your sitemap. If you see pages you don't recognize, contact whoever manages your hosting today.

Check 2: Is your Google listing alive?

In incognito, search your business name plus your city. For example: "Rodriguez Auto Repair Tampa".

Your Google Business Profile should appear, that box on the right or on the map, with name, address, phone, hours, and reviews.

You fail if: it doesn't appear, the phone or address doesn't match your website exactly, or your most recent review is more than six months old.

What to do: for a local business, the Google listing drives more calls than the website itself. It's the highest-return asset you own and the most neglected. Here's the full listing audit, step by step: how to audit your Google Business Profile

Check 3: What is Google showing about you?

In that same search, read the blue title and the two gray lines under it. That text decides whether people click you or click your competitor.

You fail if: the title says "Home," "Welcome," or just your company name; your city doesn't appear; or the gray text is cut off mid-sentence.

What to do: your homepage title should follow this formula: what you do + where + for whom. "24h Emergency Plumbing in Tampa | Rodriguez & Sons" sells. "Home - Rodriguez & Sons" sells nothing.

Do they understand you in 5 seconds? (3 minutes)

Check 4: The stranger test

Open your homepage on your phone. Cover the logo with your finger.

Now imagine you're arriving for the first time. In five seconds, without scrolling, you should be able to answer:

• What does this business sell?
• Where does it operate?
• What am I supposed to do now?

You fail if: you can't answer any one of the three.

What to do: this is the most common failure and the most expensive. Lines like "Comprehensive solutions for your home" or "Excellence and commitment since 2010" say nothing. Replace them with the literal version: "We repair AC units in Pasco and Hillsborough. Same-day service." Boring and specific converts better than pretty and vague.

Check 5: Is there a button before the first scroll?

Without scrolling, look at your homepage on mobile. There must be a visible action button: call, WhatsApp, or request a quote.

You fail if: the first thing you see is a photo carousel, a video, or a giant logo with no button.

What to do: one button, just one, in a contrasting color, with a verb. "Get a free quote" works. "Learn more" doesn't. And a hamburger menu doesn't count as a button, nobody opens a menu to buy.

Can they contact you? (7 minutes)

This is the block almost nobody runs and the one that recovers the most money. These three checks find lost customers you are already getting today.

Check 6: Be your own customer

Do it right now, for real:

• Fill out your own contact form with real details and submit it.
• Message yourself through the WhatsApp button on your site.
• Call your own number from another phone.

Time how long each one takes to reach you, and whether it reaches you at all.

You fail if: the form errors out, the email never arrives, it lands in an inbox nobody checks, it goes to spam, WhatsApp opens the wrong number, or the phone rings with no answer.

What to do: we've audited sites that went months without a single form submission because the destination email belonged to an employee who no longer worked there. The owner thought "the website doesn't work." The website worked fine. Run this test once a month, always.

Check 7: How much friction is there in contacting you?

Check three specific things:

• Phone: when you tap it on mobile, does it dial automatically? If people have to copy and paste it, you lose half your calls.
• WhatsApp: when tapped, does it open the chat with a message already written? A blank chat forces the customer to think of what to say, and many close it right there.
• Form: how many fields? Four or fewer: name, phone, service, message. Not one more.

You fail if: any of the three fails.

What to do: every extra field you ask for costs you contacts. You don't need the address, the last name, or "how did you hear about us" before you've spoken to the person. Ask that later, once you have the phone number.

Check 8: How far away is contact?

Visit three pages on your site other than the homepage. From each one, count how many clicks it takes to be able to contact you.

You fail if: any of them takes more than one click, or forces you back to the homepage.

What to do: a fixed WhatsApp or call button, visible on every page, at all times. Customers decide to contact you when they feel like it, not when they reach the end of your ideal path.

Does it hold up technically? (5 minutes)

Check 9: Speed, padlock, and screen width

Three quick tests:

• Search Google for PageSpeed Insights, paste your homepage URL, and look at the mobile score, not desktop.
• Check whether the security padlock appears next to your web address.
• On your phone, swipe left and right on several pages.

You fail if: the mobile score is below 50, there's no padlock (or it says "Not secure"), or the page slides sideways off the screen.

What to do: the number one cause of slowness for local businesses is uncompressed images, 5 MB photos uploaded straight from a phone. Compressing them usually fixes half the problem without touching any code. "Not secure" is urgent: Google penalizes it and visitors see it.

Check 10: Are you measuring anything?

Ask yourself: do you know how many people visited your site last month? And how many submitted the form?

You fail if: you can't answer both with an exact number.

What to do: if you're not tracking form submissions and WhatsApp clicks as events, you don't have an audit, you have an opinion. Google Analytics 4 is free and takes under half an hour to install. Without measurement, every change you make afterward is faith, not strategy.

Your score

Count your passes:

• 8 to 10 — Your site works. Optimize and measure. You're in position to invest in advertising without wasting it.
• 5 to 7 — You're losing customers who already arrive. Fix Block 3 this week. Nothing else.
• 0 to 4 — The site isn't an asset, it's an expensive brochure. Time to rebuild it around lead capture, not catalog.

The repair order

Here's where this guide separates from every other one. You just reviewed in one order. Do not fix in that order.

Fix like this:

• First, Block 3 (contact). Recovers customers reaching your site today who can't get through. Immediate effect, near-zero cost. If your form is broken, every day that passes is money lost on traffic you already paid for.
• Second, Block 1 (visibility). Brings more people in. Takes weeks or months to pay off, but it's what grows volume.
• Third, Block 2 (message). Converts more of the people already arriving. Requires thinking and writing, not a single click.
• Fourth, Block 4 (technical). Important, yes, but a fast website with a broken form still delivers zero customers.

The logic is simple: Block 3 multiplies what you already have, Block 1 takes time to arrive, and Block 4 generates no revenue on its own. Most agencies start with Block 4 because it's the easiest to bill and the easiest to show off in a nice-looking report.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I run this audit?

All 10 checks, every three months. Check 6, testing your own form, WhatsApp, and phone, once a month without fail.

Do I need paid tools to audit my website?

No. Everything here runs on Google, your phone, and PageSpeed Insights, which is free.

My site is new and doesn't show up on Google, is it broken?

Not necessarily. A new site can take days to a few weeks to get indexed. Register it in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap to speed it up.

Does this work if my site is built on Wix, WordPress, or Squarespace?

Yes. All 10 checks are platform-independent because they measure results, not technology.

What if my business has no physical location?

Everything applies except the address. Set your Google Business Profile up as a service-area business and define the zones you cover, without publishing an address.