You don’t need to be technical to find most of the problems that cost a small business enquiries. With 30 minutes, a phone, a laptop and a few free tools, you can check the things that matter most. This checklist splits the time into six five-minute blocks. Work through them in order and write down anything that fails.
This checklist is about your visitors’ experience and the basics search engines rely on. It won’t replace a full professional audit, but it will tell you whether you need one.
Before you start
- Have your website open on your phone and on a laptop.
- Open a notes document with three headings: Broken, Confusing, Slow.
- If you have Google Search Console access, open it. If you don’t, add “set up Search Console” to your list.
Minutes 0–5: the first impression on mobile
Open your home page on your phone as if you were a new customer.
- Within five seconds, can you tell what the business does and where?
- Is there an obvious next step: call, book, get a quote, shop?
- Does anything overlap, cut off or need sideways scrolling?
- Can you tap buttons and links easily, without hitting the wrong one?
- Does the menu open and close properly?
Ask someone who doesn’t know your business to do this too. They’ll notice things you’ve stopped seeing.
Minutes 5–10: speed
Slow sites lose people before the page even appears, especially on mobile data.
- Run your home page through our free speed check. It reports Core Web Vitals and the images, fonts and scripts slowing the page down.
- Do the same for your most important page: a key service, a top product or your booking page.
- Note any very large images. Photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone are the most common cause of slow small-business sites.
Our Core Web Vitals guide explains what the scores mean and what usually fixes them.
Minutes 10–15: search basics
- Search Google for
site:yourdomain.com. Roughly how many pages appear? Are there pages you don’t recognise, or important pages missing? - Look at the titles in those results. Does each page have its own clear title, or do many say the same thing?
- Search for your business name. Does your site appear first? Is your Google Business Profile showing correct details?
- Run a key page through our free SEO check for titles, descriptions, headings, indexability, canonicals, sitemap and structured data.
- In Search Console, check the Pages report for errors and the Performance report for the searches people use to find you.
If you’re a local business, our local SEO checklist goes further.
Minutes 15–20: forms and contact routes
This is the most important five minutes on the list. A form that doesn’t send costs more than almost any other website problem, and it fails silently.
- Submit every form on your site with a test message. Did the email arrive? How long did it take? Did it land in spam?
- Did you see a clear confirmation on screen?
- Tap your phone number on mobile. Does it start a call?
- Click your email link and your map link. Do they work?
- If you take bookings or payments, make a test booking (and cancel it).
Minutes 20–25: accessibility quick checks
These quick checks catch common barriers that affect many visitors, not just people with disabilities.
- Keyboard: on a laptop, press Tab repeatedly from the top of the page. Can you always see where you are? Can you open the menu and reach the contact form?
- Zoom: zoom the browser to 200%. Does the page still work?
- Contrast: is any text pale grey on white, or light text on a busy photo?
- Images: run our free accessibility check to spot missing alt text, unlabelled fields and contrast failures.
If your organization has 50 or more employees in Ontario, accessibility is a legal requirement. See our AODA website compliance guide.
Minutes 25–30: trust and housekeeping
- Does the browser show the padlock (HTTPS) on every page, with no warnings?
- Is the copyright year, team list, pricing and opening hours current?
- Is there a privacy policy, and does it match what your forms collect?
- Are there any “coming soon” pages, test pages or placeholder text still live?
- Do your social links point to accounts you still use?
- Is your business described the same way here as on your Google profile and directories?
Bonus if you have time: check whether AI assistants can read your site. Our free AI search check looks at AI crawler access, machine-readable summaries and structure.
Reading your results
- Mostly fine, a few small issues: fix them yourself or ask your developer. Repeat this check every few months.
- Forms broken, site very slow, or security warnings: treat those as urgent. They’re costing you enquiries now.
- Lots of problems across every section: you need a proper diagnosis before spending money on fixes. Our guide to redesign versus rescue will help you decide what kind.
Or let the tool do the first pass
Our free website audit runs automated checks on speed, SEO basics, accessibility, security headers and AI crawler access together, and explains each finding in plain English. It checks one page in about a minute. It won’t test your forms or judge your content; that’s what the checklist above is for.
Turning your findings into a fix plan
After 30 minutes you’ll have a list. Sort it into three groups:
- Fix this week: anything that loses enquiries or trust right now. Broken forms, security warnings, wrong phone numbers, pages that don’t work on mobile.
- Fix this month: things that slow people down or hurt search. Oversized images, missing page titles, unclear calls to action, accessibility failures.
- Plan for later: bigger improvements that need thought or budget, such as restructuring the site, rewriting service pages or a redesign.
Within each group, start with the pages that get the most visits: usually the home page, your top service or product pages and the contact page. Fixing one problem on a page that gets hundreds of visits beats fixing ten problems on pages nobody sees.
Then put a date in your calendar to repeat the checklist in three months. Websites drift: new content, new plugins and new tracking scripts slowly undo good work.
Five problems we find most often
- A contact form that stopped sending months ago.
- Hero images several megabytes in size.
- Every page sharing the same title.
- No visible keyboard focus, so the site can’t be used without a mouse.
- An out-of-date phone number or address in the footer.
When to get a professional audit
Automated tools and DIY checks can’t judge everything: whether your content answers what customers ask, whether your structure makes sense, or what to fix first for the best return. Our paid audits are reviewed by a person. The Website Audit ($49) gives a reviewed fix list across speed, SEO basics, accessibility and security, and deeper options are on our pricing page. If something is badly broken, a Rescue Plan ($199) diagnoses it and sets out the repairs in priority order.
Written by the CHRISPS studio in Cambridge, Ontario.