The 15-Minute Website Checkup You Can Do Yourself

You do not need to be technical to find out whether your website is quietly costing you business. You need a phone, fifteen minutes, and the willingness to use your own site the way a stranger would. Most of the problems I get hired to fix announce themselves in this checkup. The trouble is that nobody runs it until a customer mentions something, and customers usually do not mention it. They just leave.

Set a timer and work through these in order.

Minutes 1 to 3: load it on your phone, on mobile data

Turn off your Wi-Fi, open your site on your phone, and be honest about the wait. Count the seconds. If you are getting impatient, so is everyone else, and they do not love you enough to wait around.

While it loads, look at what shows first. Is it clear what you do and where you are? Can you tell what to do next? A slow or confusing first screen is the single most common finding in this whole checkup.

Minutes 4 to 6: tap the phone number and the contact buttons

Tap your phone number. It should open your dialer with the number filled in. If nothing happens, or it tries to open some odd app, that link is broken, and every mobile visitor who tried to call you hit the same wall.

Do the same with your main buttons. Book now, get a quote, directions, whatever your site asks people to do. Every button should go somewhere sensible. Dead buttons are silent money losers.

Minutes 7 to 10: send the contact form, and confirm it arrives

Fill out your own contact form exactly like a customer would, and send it. Then go check the inbox it is supposed to land in. Not the spam folder theory, the actual inbox. Did it arrive? How long did it take?

This is the check that fails most often, and it fails silently. The site says "thanks, we will be in touch," the customer believes it, and the message went nowhere. If yours does not arrive, that is a fixable plumbing problem, and I walk through the usual causes in why your contact form is not sending. Do not shrug this one off. A week of lost form submissions can cost more than the repair.

Minutes 11 to 13: click the menu and look in a private window

Click every item in your main menu. You are looking for pages that error, pages that go to the wrong place, and pages so out of date they embarrass you a little. Old prices and departed staff count.

Then open the site in a private or incognito window. That shows you the site the way a first time visitor sees it, without your logged in session or your cache flattering it. Popups you forgot existed, cookie banners covering the content, weird warnings, this is where they show up.

Minutes 14 to 15: search your own business name

Google your business name and look at your own result with fresh eyes. Is the title sensible? Does the description sound like you? Is the phone number right? Click through from the result, because that is the front door most people actually use.

What to do with what you find

Write down every failure, even the small ones. Some of them, an outdated page, a wrong number, you can fix yourself in five minutes. The pattern matters too: one small failure is a chore, but three or four together usually means the site has not had a proper once-over in a while, and the routine in my website maintenance checklist is built to keep it from getting back to that state. This kind of regular checking is also baked into the monthly support plan, for owners who would rather it just happened.

Run this checkup every couple of months and you will catch most problems while they are still cheap.

And if your fifteen minutes turned up more than you want to untangle alone, bring the list. On a screen share we can go through your findings together, live, and you will watch each one get fixed and learn what to watch for next time.