How to run this check
Open your own site on your phone, not your desktop. Most of your visitors are on a phone, and most site owners only ever look at their site on a big monitor with a fast connection while logged into the admin panel. That is the single biggest blind spot in this whole business.
Then work down the list. Each item is either true or it is not — there is no scoring, no grade out of a hundred. The first three are worth more than the other six combined, so if you only have ten minutes, do those.
1. Your form does not actually deliver
Submit your own contact form right now with a real message. Then check the inbox it is supposed to reach, and the spam folder.
Forms break silently and constantly: a hosting move changes the mail configuration, a plugin updates, a notification address belongs to someone who left, a spam filter starts quarantining your own site's mail. Nothing on the page changes. Visitors still see "thanks, we will be in touch". The enquiries just stop arriving, and you conclude that business is slow.
Test it monthly. Put a reminder in your calendar. This is the cheapest insurance in the entire list.
2. Your phone number is not tappable above the fold
On the phone, before scrolling: can you see a phone number, and does tapping it start a call?
Two common failures. The number is there but rendered inside an image or a graphic header, so tapping does nothing. Or the number is only in the footer, five screens down. Both convert a ready-to-call visitor into a bounce.
If your business runs on inbound calls, the number belongs in the header on every page and it belongs in a sticky bar that stays visible while scrolling.
3. Nobody can tell what you do in two seconds
Cover everything on your homepage except the first headline. Show it to someone who does not know your business and ask what the company does and who for.
If they hesitate, the headline is decoration rather than communication. The fix is a sentence naming the service, the customer, and the place: "Commercial roof repair and replacement for property managers across Phoenix." Unglamorous, and it works.
4. It takes more than about three seconds to load on mobile data
Turn off wifi and load your homepage on cellular. Count. If you are watching things shuffle around while images arrive, that is what a first-time visitor gets too.
The usual culprit is uncompressed images — a photo straight off a phone camera is several megabytes and gets displayed at a fraction of that size. A page carrying eight of them is a slow page no matter how good your hosting is. Second most common: a stack of tracking scripts and third-party widgets, each adding a connection before anything renders.
Speed matters for two separate reasons. Visitors leave, and search engines use real-world load data as a ranking input. You lose on both sides at once.
5. Every page ends the same vague way
"Contact us for more information" is not a call to action, it is a shrug. It asks the visitor to do the work of deciding what happens next.
Every page should end with one specific, low-friction next step that matches where the reader is: a price page ends in "get a fixed quote", a service page ends in "book a 20-minute call", an emergency page ends in a phone number and nothing else.
6. There is no proof anywhere
Count the pieces of evidence on your site that a competitor could not copy in five minutes: photos of your actual jobs, reviews naming specific work, before-and-afters, named clients, licence numbers, team photos.
If the count is zero, no wording change will fix your conversion rate. Go take twenty photos of finished work on your phone this week. It is the highest-return unpaid hour available to you.
7. Nothing is tracked, so nothing can be judged
Can you say how many enquiries the site produced last month, and which pages produced them? Most owners cannot, because analytics was either never installed or installed without any conversion tracking — which measures traffic, the least important number available.
You need three things recorded: form submissions, clicks on the phone number, and booking completions. Until those exist, every decision about the site is a guess, including the decision to rebuild it.
8. You have one page for a business with six services
A single "Services" page listing everything you do cannot rank for any of it, and cannot make a persuasive case for any of it either. Someone searching for one specific job lands on a page where their job is one bullet among twelve.
One page per service, each answering that service's questions, is the structure that both readers and search engines want. It is more work, and it is the difference between showing up and not.
9. Nobody has touched it in two years
Check the copyright year in your footer, the last blog post, the prices, the services list, and whether the staff named on the About page still work there.
A stale site does not just look neglected to visitors. It signals to you that the site is not part of how the business runs — and a website that nobody owns is a website that quietly decays until someone declares it broken and buys a new one, starting the cycle again.
Questions people ask about this
I failed most of these. Do I need a new website?
Probably not immediately. Items one, two, three, five, and seven are fixable on almost any platform in a day or two of focused work. Do those first and see what changes. A rebuild is justified when the platform itself blocks the fixes, or when the site is slow in ways that cannot be resolved without starting over.
What if I pass all nine and still get no enquiries?
Then you have a visibility problem rather than a conversion problem, and the work moves to SEO, local search presence, and reviews. That is a different project with a slower payback. Confirm it by checking whether anyone is finding the site at all before spending anything.
How often should I re-run this check?
The form test monthly, because it breaks silently. The rest twice a year, plus after any hosting change, plugin update, or redesign. Things that were true at launch stop being true without anyone touching them.
