Is Your Website Actually Costing You Customers? A Self-Audit Checklist
It's genuinely hard to judge your own website objectively — you already know what everything means and where everything is, which is exactly the perspective a real first-time visitor doesn't have. This checklist is a practical way to close that gap yourself.
Speed check
Run your homepage through pagespeed.web.dev. A score in the 90s is strong, 50-89 is workable but improvable, below 50 is a real, measurable problem worth prioritising.
Mobile check
Open your own site on your phone, on cellular data rather than WiFi, and try to complete the exact action you want a customer to take — start to finish, with no prior familiarity with the layout.
Clarity check
Show your homepage to someone unfamiliar with your business for five seconds, then ask them to explain what the business does. If they can't, that's a genuine, fixable problem with the headline and the content above the fold — not a minor detail.
Trust check
Look at your own site the way a stranger about to hand over money would. Is there a real address, a real phone number, real photos rather than generic stock imagery, and any evidence of actual past work or clients?
Analytics check
If you already have Google Analytics running: what's the bounce rate on your homepage, and which pages do people leave from most? A consistently high bounce rate on a specific page points directly at where the actual problem lives. If you don't have Analytics set up at all, that itself is worth fixing first.
Conversion check
From any page on your site, count how many clicks it takes a visitor to actually contact you or take the action you want. If the honest answer is more than two, that's friction actively costing you inquiries — independent of how good the rest of the site looks.
None of these checks need technical skill. They need looking at your own site the way someone who's never seen it before would, which is the hardest perspective to get on your own without a deliberate checklist like this one.