The 12-Minute Website Audit Any Owner Can Run
Most website problems are not subtle. They're sitting in plain sight, and the only reason they persist is that nobody has spent a quiet twelve minutes looking.
Here's the audit we run before quoting anyone. You can run it yourself. Get a timer.
Minute 1–2: Load your homepage on your phone, on cellular
Not on office Wi-Fi. Turn Wi-Fi off. Count the seconds until you can read something.
Anything past three seconds is costing you visitors, and the gap between your phone experience and your desktop experience is usually where the worst problems hide.
Minute 3–4: Try to contact yourself
Fill in your own contact form. Send it. Then check whether the email arrived — inbox and spam.
We find broken contact forms on roughly one in six sites we inherit. The form submits, the page says thank you, and the message goes nowhere. Nobody notices because the failure is silent on both ends.
Minute 5–6: Click every link in your navigation and footer
All of them. Note anything that 404s, loops back to the homepage, or lands on a page with lorem ipsum on it.
Footer links are where dead ends accumulate, because nobody redesigns a footer — they inherit one.
Minute 7–8: Search Google for your business name
Look at what shows up: the title, the description, whether the right page is first. If your homepage title still says "Home" or your description is a truncated sentence about WordPress themes, you're leaving clicks on the table for free.
While you're there, check whether old pages you deleted are still in results. Those are your 404s.
Minute 9–10: View your site with images blocked
In most browsers you can disable images in site settings. Reload your homepage.
What remains is roughly what a screen reader and a search engine see. If your headline was inside an image, or your entire value proposition disappeared, you've found a real problem.
Minute 11–12: Check when things were last updated
Look at your copyright year. Your latest blog post. Your team page. Your platform's update notifications.
A footer that says 2023 tells a visitor more about your business than any of your copy does — and none of it is what you want it to say.
What to do with the list
You'll finish with somewhere between three and fifteen items. Sort them by this rule: anything that stops a customer from reaching you comes first, anything that costs you traffic comes second, everything else is decoration.
Then fix the top three this week. Not all fifteen. Three.