The 10-minute website self-audit: read your site like a customer

The most useful thing you can do for your website costs nothing and takes about ten minutes. It isn’t buying a new theme, adding a chatbot, or paying someone to “optimise” something you can’t see. It’s this: look at your own site the way a stranger would.

That’s harder than it sounds. You built the site, or you paid someone to, and you know where everything lives. You know the phone number by heart. You know the contact form works because it worked the day it went in. A customer knows none of that. They arrive cold, usually on a phone, usually in a hurry, and they decide in a few seconds whether you’re worth their time. If anything trips them up, they don’t email to tell you. They just leave, and you never find out why.

So let’s pretend to be that stranger. Below are ten checks. Each one takes roughly a minute. For each, I’ll tell you how to do it, what a good result looks like, and — more importantly — what a bad result is usually telling you underneath. Grab your phone and a cup of tea. Keep a tally of how many you fail.

1. Load it on your phone, on mobile data

Turn off your office wifi first. This matters. Your wifi is fast and your site is probably cached on your own devices, so it always feels quick to you. Your customers are on a train, in a car park, or on a patchy 4G signal. Switch to mobile data, open a fresh browser tab, and load your site.

Good: it appears within two or three seconds, and everything fits the screen — no pinching, no sideways scrolling, text you can read without zooming.

Bad: it takes five or more seconds, or you’re staring at a blank screen, or the layout is squashed and you have to scroll left and right to read a sentence. A slow load usually means oversized images or a bloated theme doing too much work. A layout that doesn’t fit means the site was never properly built for phones — and most of your visitors are on phones. If this one fails, my piece on why your website is so slow goes deeper.

2. Try to buy, book, or enquire — as a stranger

Every site has one main thing you want people to do: buy a product, book an appointment, or send an enquiry. Actually try to do it, start to finish, as if you’d never seen the site before. Don’t take your usual shortcut. Follow the path a first-timer would follow.

Good: you can complete the whole thing without guessing, backtracking, or hunting for a hidden button.

Bad: you get stuck, confused, or the process just fizzles out with no clear next step. This is the single most expensive problem a website can have, because everything else exists to get people here. If the main action is hard, all your other effort is wasted. For shops specifically, why customers abandon your checkout covers the usual culprits.

3. Check the padlock

Look at the very top of the browser, in the address bar, just to the left of your web address. There should be a small padlock icon, and the address should begin with “https” rather than “http”. That padlock means the connection between your visitor and your site is encrypted — nobody can snoop on what they type in.

Good: a plain padlock, no warnings, no red text, no “Not secure” label.

Bad: the browser says “Not secure”, or shows a warning triangle, or the padlock is broken or crossed out. This one frightens customers off instantly — modern browsers put a scary message right where people are about to type their details. Underneath, it usually means your security certificate has expired or was never set up properly. It’s fixable, often quickly, but it needs doing today, not next month.

4. Google your business name

Open a search engine and type your business name, as a customer who half-remembers you would. Look at what actually comes back — not what you hope comes back.

Good: your real website is the top result, with the correct name, and any address, phone number, or opening hours shown alongside it are current.

Bad: an old site you thought was gone, a social media page instead of your site, wrong opening hours, a closed-down address, or a competitor sitting above you. Stale information here does quiet damage every single day, because this is often the very first thing a potential customer sees. Wrong hours send people to a locked door. An old site can mean two versions of you are live at once, which confuses both customers and search engines.

5. Read your homepage aloud

Actually say it out loud. Look only at the top portion of the homepage — the part you see before scrolling, sometimes called “above the fold”. Can you tell, in one plain sentence, what you do and who you do it for?

Good: something like “We’re a family plumbing firm covering Leeds” is right there, obvious, in plain words.

Bad: a vague slogan, a big photo with no explanation, or clever wording that sounds nice but says nothing. “Delivering excellence since 2004” tells a customer nothing about what they can buy from you. If a stranger has to scroll and hunt to work out what you even do, many won’t bother. Confusion at the top of the page is a silent leak.

6. Click every menu item

Go along your navigation menu and click each link in turn, including anything tucked in the footer. Don’t assume — click.

Good: every link goes to a real, finished page.

Bad: a “Page not found” error, a blank page, a link that goes nowhere, or a page that’s clearly half-built with placeholder text. Dead links make a site feel abandoned, and they knock a customer’s confidence: if the menu is broken, they wonder what else is. A “page not found” also often points to a page that was deleted or renamed without the link being updated — small neglect that adds up.

7. Find your phone number as a stranger would

Pretend you want to phone or email right now. How fast can you find how to reach you? Time it in your head.

Good: the number or a clear “Contact” link is visible within a few seconds, ideally on every page, and on a phone the number is tappable so it dials straight away.

Bad: you have to dig through menus, scroll to the very bottom, or the number is buried inside a paragraph. Some customers simply want to talk to a human, and if you make that hard, they’ll ring someone easier to reach. On a phone, a number that isn’t tappable is a small but real friction — every extra step loses a few people.

8. Check the copyright year and your last blog post

Scroll to the very bottom of any page and look at the copyright line — it usually reads something like “© 2019”. Then, if you have a news or blog section, look at the date on your most recent post.

Good: the year is current, and if you publish anything, it’s been touched in the last few months.

Bad: a copyright year several years old, or a “latest news” post from 2021. On its own, an old year is cosmetic. But it’s a reliable signal of something worse: a site nobody has logged into for years. And a site nobody maintains is usually a site whose software hasn’t been updated either — which is exactly how sites get hacked. A stale date is often the visible tip of a security problem you can’t see.

9. Actually submit your contact form

This is the one almost nobody does. Fill in your own contact form with a real message — write “test, please ignore” — and send it. Then go and check whether it actually arrived, in the inbox, not the spam folder.

Good: the message lands in the right inbox within a couple of minutes.

Bad: nothing arrives, or it turns up in spam, or you never find where it was meant to go. Forms break silently and often — an email setting changes, a plugin updates, a mailbox fills up — and because there’s no error message, you carry on with no idea that weeks of enquiries have vanished into nothing. If you do only one check on this list, do this one. A broken form is lost money you never even knew you were losing.

10. Look at it on a big screen too

Now open the site on a laptop or desktop monitor and make the browser window full-width. Phones matter most, but plenty of people buy from a proper screen, and sites built phone-first sometimes fall apart when they’re stretched wide.

Good: the layout holds together — sensible margins, images the right size, nothing marooned.

Bad: a huge empty band of white space, text stretched into one endless line across the screen, or images blown up until they’re fuzzy. This usually means the site was only ever really tested at one size. It looks amateurish on the bigger screens where higher-value customers often sit.

What your score means, and when to get help

Add up how many checks you failed.

None, or one: you’re in good shape. Fix the single issue and move on. This isn’t a sign of a deeper problem.

Two: worth attention, but usually two separate small jobs rather than one big one. Sort them and re-run the list.

Three or more: this is the line I’d draw. When three or more of these fail, you’re rarely looking at three unrelated bugs. You’re looking at one structural cause — a site that’s been left untended, built on shaky foundations, or never properly set up for phones and security in the first place. Patching them one by one tends to be slow, frustrating, and short-lived, because the same root keeps producing new symptoms.

The good news is you now know far more about your own site than most owners ever do, and you found it out in ten minutes without spending anything. If you’d rather have a second pair of eyes, that’s exactly what my free site check is for — I’ll run these checks and a fair few more, and tell you plainly what I find. Either way, the important thing has already happened: you’ve looked at your site as a customer, not an owner. That habit alone will keep you ahead of most of your competitors.