In shortMost sites do not lose work because of how they look. They lose it because a ready-to-buy visitor could not do the one thing they came to do.
Do this on your phone, not your computer.
This matters more than anything else in this document. Most people who look at a business website for the first time are on a phone, often outdoors, often distracted, often deciding between you and two competitors they have open in other tabs.
Looking at your own site on a large desktop monitor, on fast office internet, already knowing where everything is, tells you almost nothing about that experience. It is the single reason obvious problems survive for years: the people who could fix them never see them.
So: pick up your phone. Use mobile data rather than office wifi if you can. And try to arrive the way a stranger would — search for what you do rather than typing your address in directly.
The first ten seconds.
Open your homepage and start counting. Most visitors decide whether to stay in less time than it takes to read this sentence.
Did the page appear in under three seconds?
On mobile data, not wifi. If you watched a blank screen, a spinner, or text that jumped around as images loaded, some proportion of your visitors did not wait to find out what happens next.
Can you tell what the business does without scrolling?
A logo and a photograph are not an answer. Someone who has never heard of you should be able to say what you do and roughly where you do it from the first screenful.
Is the next step obvious?
Call, book, request a quote — one clear action, visible immediately. If the most prominent element is a slideshow or a welcome message, the page is decorating rather than working.
Does anything cover the content?
Cookie banners, chat bubbles, newsletter popups and app prompts stack up on small screens. Together they can hide the entire first screenful.
Does it look like it was built this decade?
This is not vanity. A visitor who cannot verify your work any other way uses the site as a proxy for whether the business is current, careful and still trading.
Can they actually contact you?
The most expensive failures live here, because they happen to visitors who had already decided to get in touch.
Tap your phone number. Does it dial?
If the number is part of an image, or is plain text, tapping does nothing. The visitor now has to memorize it, switch apps and type it. Many will not, and you will never know they were there.
Is the phone number visible without scrolling, on every page?
Not just the homepage and not just the contact page. Someone who lands on a service page from a search result should not have to navigate to reach you.
Fill in your own contact form and send it.
Actually send it. Broken forms are startlingly common and completely silent — there is no error, no bounce, no alert. The business simply concludes that the website does not generate enquiries.
Did the message arrive, and how long did it take?
Check spam as well. A form that delivers to a folder nobody reads is the same as a form that does not work.
How many fields does the form ask for?
Every additional field costs you submissions. If you are asking for a postal address and a preferred contact time before you have earned anything, some people will close the tab instead.
Are your opening hours and service area findable in one tap?
Two of the three most common questions a visitor arrives with. The third is price, which is covered below.
Does it answer the questions people actually have?
Compare what your site emphasizes against what customers ask you on the phone. The gap between those two lists is usually the whole problem.
Does each service have its own page?
A single page listing fourteen services in one dense paragraph cannot rank for any of them and cannot convince anyone about any of them. Someone searching for one specific thing should land on a page about that thing.
Is there any indication of price?
A range, a starting figure, a worked example — anything. "Contact us for a quote" as the only answer filters out the people who are simply trying to work out whether you are in their budget, which is most of them.
Is there evidence you have done this before?
Photographs of your own work, named reviews, specifics about jobs you have completed. Stock photography actively works against this: a visitor who recognizes a stock image learns that you had nothing real to show.
Can someone tell whether you serve their area?
For any business with a service radius this is a yes-or-no question that should be answerable in seconds, and frequently is not answerable at all.
Is anything on the page out of date?
A copyright year three years behind, a "new for 2019" banner, a team page listing people who left, prices you no longer honor. Each one quietly tells a visitor nobody is minding the shop.
The mechanics.
Still on your phone. These are the ones that make a site feel broken rather than merely dated.
Do you have to pinch or zoom to read anything?
That means the site was built for desktop and shrunk. It is the clearest signal that the site predates the way people now browse.
Can you scroll sideways?
If the page slides left and right, something is wider than the screen. It makes the whole site feel unstable under the thumb.
Are buttons and links easy to hit with a thumb?
Links spaced a few pixels apart are a desktop pattern. On a phone they produce mis-taps, and a mis-tap that lands on the wrong page is often where the visit ends.
Does the address bar show a padlock?
Without HTTPS, browsers warn visitors that the site is not secure — usually right next to your contact form. Certificates are free and this has been standard for years.
Try it one-handed, in bright light.
Low-contrast grey text on a white background is a common design choice that becomes unreadable outdoors, which is exactly where trade and service customers use their phones.
Can people find you at all?
Everything above assumes a visitor arrived. These two checks test whether they can.
Search your business name. Do you come up first?
If you do not rank for your own name, something is badly wrong — usually a site that search engines cannot read, or a duplicate listing competing with you.
Search for what you do, plus your town. Where are you?
Use a private window so your own history does not flatter the result. If you are nowhere, the site is not competing for the searches that actually produce work.
Search a specific service, plus your town.
Broad terms are hard. Specific ones are winnable — and they are also where the ready-to-buy visitors are. A site with a real page per service can compete here; a site with one services page cannot.
What your answers mean.
If you failed items in the contact section, stop reading and fix those first. They are cheap, they are quick, and they are costing you work from people who had already decided to get in touch. A tappable phone number and a form that delivers are worth more than any redesign.
If the contact paths work but the first-ten-seconds and questions sections went badly, you have a positioning and structure problem rather than a technical one. The site works; it just is not making the case. That is usually solved by rewriting and restructuring rather than rebuilding.
If most sections went badly and the site is more than about eight years old, you are past the point where fixes are economical. Each change fights the underlying structure, and you end up paying repeatedly to patch something that needs replacing.
And if nearly everything passed: good. Do not let anyone talk you into a redesign you do not need. Spend the money on getting more people to the site instead.