The 10-Point Website Check: What I Look For Before a Small Business Website Review

I’ve spent this month opening one local business website after another and running the same ten checks, in the same order, every time. Not because I love repetition, but because these are the ten things I check on every client project before we touch a single design decision, and I got curious what would happen if I ran them on businesses that had never hired me. The answer, over and over, was that the work behind these websites was good. The site standing in front of it was quietly getting in the way.

Here’s the full list, the same one I use on paying projects, so you can run it on your own site this afternoon.

1. The five-second test

Land on your own homepage and give yourself five seconds, no scrolling. Can a stranger tell what you do, where you are, and what to do next? I looked at a site this month with a gorgeous hero photo and the sentence “innovative solutions for your business,” which told me nothing, solutions to what, for whom. If any of the three is missing, that’s the first fix, and it’s usually one sentence.

2. One clear next step on every page

Every page needs one obvious action, book, call, or get the quote. I counted five buttons of equal size on a homepage recently, Book Now and Learn More and Our Story and Shop and Sign Up for the Newsletter, all shouting the same volume. When everything is a priority, a visitor picks none of it.

3. The phone test

Open your site on an actual phone, not the laptop you approved it on. Menu works with a thumb, the phone number is tappable instead of decorative text, the booking button exists where you’d expect it. Most of your visitors are already here. I’ve seen a homepage that was lovely on desktop and had no booking button at all on mobile, which is a storefront with a locked door.

4. It loads before they leave

Slow sites lose people before your design ever gets a chance to matter, and it’s almost always the images doing the damage, a handful of huge, uncompressed photos sitting where the homepage should load in a second or two. If your site takes more than a few seconds on a phone connection, that’s business you’re losing without ever knowing it happened.

5. Proof a stranger would believe

Real photos of your work, testimonials with full names, projects with dates on them. I keep seeing the same swap needed: “trusted by hundreds of happy customers” sitting where one named review and one photo of the actual work would do more convincing in a single sentence than the slogan does in a paragraph. Strangers don’t believe adjectives. They believe evidence.

6. An about page that sounds like a person

People hire people, not companies. If your about page could get lifted and dropped onto a competitor’s site and nobody would notice, it isn’t doing its job. This is the page where owners tend to write the most cautiously and the least like themselves, which is backwards, since it’s the one place a visitor is actively hoping to meet you.

7. A contact form someone actually answers

Short form, no unnecessary fields, a reply within a business day. Test your own form once a month, fill it out like a stranger would and see what happens on the other end. I’ve found broken forms sitting live on real business sites for months, quietly eating leads nobody knew existed.

8. Local signals where search can see them

Your city and service area named in plain text on the homepage, and a Google Business Profile that matches what your site says. If you serve Buffalo, the word Buffalo needs to exist on the page somewhere a search engine can read it, not just in a photo caption or a logo.

9. A page for each service you want to sell

“Solutions” sells nothing, and neither does a single vague services paragraph trying to cover everything you offer. If there’s a service you specifically want more of, it needs its own page, with examples and a starting point named, or you’re asking visitors to guess which of your many capabilities they should be excited about.

10. One voice, everywhere

Your site, your emails, your social posts, they should all sound like the same person wrote them on the same day, because a stranger meeting your business across three different channels is quietly checking whether you’re consistent before they decide whether you’re trustworthy. If they don’t match, write the voice down somewhere. It’s also the thing that makes AI tools produce copy that sounds like you instead of like everyone else typing into the same box.

The three I catch most often

Here’s the honest version, not a stat, just the pattern I keep bumping into. Local signals get skipped constantly, an owner will name their neighborhood in conversation five times and never once put it on the homepage. Proof stays hidden, real testimonials and real project photos exist somewhere, a folder, a phone, a drawer, and never make it onto the page where they’d actually do work. And the phone test gets skipped entirely, because the person approving the site is almost always looking at it on a laptop, and the customer almost never is.

None of these three are expensive to fix. They’re invisible from inside the business, which is a different problem than being hard, and it’s the exact reason a second set of eyes finds them in minutes.

Where to start

If you ran through this and found three or four things worth fixing, that’s normal, and it means your site has a few afternoons of cheap repair ahead of it, not a rebuild. I put the short version of this list into a free checklist you can work through on your own, no email required, at vagaricreative.com/checklist. And if you’d rather I take a look myself, the 15-minute website review is free too, you send me your homepage and I tell you what a stranger sees, at vagaricreative.com/review. Either way, the goal is the same one I had opening all those tabs this month, that the next person who lands on your site for five seconds walks away knowing exactly what you do, where you are, and where to click.