A website isn’t neutral. It’s either bringing you work or quietly turning people away, and the second one is hard to notice because nobody emails to tell you they left.
Here are five signs worth checking. None of them require an audit tool — you can test all five yourself in about fifteen minutes.
1. It takes more than about three seconds to load on a phone
Not on your office wifi on a desktop. On a phone, on mobile data, cold. That’s how a decent share of your visitors arrive, and it’s the slowest version of your site — which makes it the honest one.
Slow sites don’t fail loudly. People just don’t wait, and the visit never appears as a lead. The usual culprits are oversized images, a stack of plugins each loading its own scripts, and fonts or third-party embeds that block the page from rendering until they arrive.
2. A stranger can’t tell what you do in five seconds
Open your homepage in front of someone who doesn’t know your business. Give them five seconds, close the laptop, and ask what you do and who you do it for.
If they hesitate, the problem usually isn’t design — it’s that the headline describes an aspiration rather than a service. “Transforming possibilities into solutions” tells a visitor nothing. “We build websites, apps, and custom software” tells them whether to keep reading.
3. Getting in touch takes more than one step
Count the actions between landing on your homepage and being able to send you a message. If the answer is more than one — scroll, hunt for a menu item, find a page, then find the form — you’re losing the people who were mildly interested, which is most of them.
Related, and more common than it should be: a contact form nobody has tested in a year. Submit your own form right now and confirm the email actually arrives, and that it lands in the inbox rather than spam. Forms fail silently, and they fail in the direction of losing work.
4. It doesn’t genuinely work on a phone
“Mobile-friendly” is not the same as tested on a phone. Open it on yours and look for the specifics: text you have to pinch to read, buttons too close together to tap confidently, a menu that needs two attempts, anything you have to scroll sideways to see.
These are small individually. Together they read as “this business doesn’t sweat details,” which is an unfortunate thing for a prospective client to conclude.
5. Nothing on it has changed in three years
A stale site is a trust problem before it’s an SEO one. Copyright still reading 2022, a team page with people who’ve left, services you no longer offer, a “latest news” section whose latest item is from another era — each one invites the same question: are they still operating?
How to check all five yourself
- Run your homepage through Google’s PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. Read the load metrics, not just the score.
- Do the five-second test on an actual stranger — not a colleague who already knows the answer.
- Submit your own contact form and check where the email lands.
- Open every main page on your own phone and try to complete the thing a customer would want to do.
- Read your own homepage copy out loud. The sentences that embarrass you are the ones to rewrite.
Most sites fail two or three of these, and most of those failures are fixable without starting over. Knowing which ones you’re failing is genuinely most of the work.
If you’d rather someone else looked
We’ll go through these with you against your actual site and tell you which are worth fixing and which don’t matter for your situation — including when the honest answer is that a rebuild costs less than patching. If it’s useful to know what that tends to cost, we wrote about website pricing separately.
Send us your URL — or read more about how we approach website development.