Most owners find out their website is losing them work by accident — a customer mentions they nearly called someone else, or a supplier says they could not find you. By then it has been happening for years. Here are four checks you can run yourself, right now, without any tools.
1. Open it on your phone, on mobile data
Not on the office wifi. Turn wifi off and load your own site the way a customer standing in their driveway would. Count the seconds until you can read something useful. If you get bored waiting, so did they — and unlike you, they had five other results to tap.
2. Try to call yourself in one tap
From the moment the page loads, how many taps to start a phone call? It should be one, and the number should be visible without scrolling. If your phone number is an image, or lives only in the footer, or is not a tappable link, you are asking a person with wet hands and a flooded kitchen to memorise eleven digits.
3. Read your own first sentence out loud
Does it say what you do and where you do it? "Welcome to our website" says neither. A stranger should know within one sentence whether you are the right trade in the right town — that is the entire job of the top of the page.
4. Search for yourself the way a customer would
Not by your business name — they do not know it yet. Search for the service and the town: "emergency plumber Ventura". If you are not on the first page, every job from that search is going to whoever is.
What to do about it
If you failed one of these, it is usually a content fix and you can do it yourself this afternoon. If you failed three or four, the site is working against you and patching it costs more attention than replacing it. That is the honest answer, and it is the same answer we would give you on the phone.
