The 20-Minute Website Health Check: A Checklist for Small Businesses
Most website problems are not dramatic. A form quietly stops sending emails. A page gets slower after a plugin update. Opening hours on Google go out of date. None of it shows up unless someone looks. This checklist takes about 20 minutes, needs no technical skills and uses only free tools.
Before you start (1 minute)
Have your phone and a laptop to hand. Open your website in a private or incognito window so you see it as a new visitor would, without saved logins. Keep a note of anything that looks wrong — you can prioritise later.
Speed and stability (4 minutes)
Paste your homepage into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool, then repeat with your most important page — usually services, booking or pricing. Look at the Core Web Vitals assessment at the top, on the mobile tab first.
Google’s published targets for a good experience are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (loading): within 2.5 seconds
- Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness): 200 milliseconds or less
- Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability): 0.1 or less
Mobile experience (3 minutes)
Now use the site on your phone as if you were a customer.
- Can you read the text without zooming?
- Does the menu open and close properly?
- Are buttons big enough to tap without hitting the wrong one?
- Does tapping your phone number start a call and your email open a new message?
- Do pop-ups or cookie banners cover the content you came for?
Enquiry forms and contact routes (4 minutes)
This is the most important check, and the one most businesses skip. Submit a real test enquiry through every form on the site.
Forms can fail silently. An expired key for the email service behind a form, for example, can stop notifications without any visible error on the website. The visitor sees “thank you” — and you never hear from them.
- Did the notification arrive? Check your spam folder too
- Did the visitor see a clear confirmation message?
- If there is an automatic reply, is it accurate and friendly?
- Are the phone number, email address and address correct everywhere?
Google visibility (4 minutes)
Search for your business name on Google, then for what you do plus your town.
- Does your Google Business Profile show the right hours, categories, phone number and website?
- Are there recent reviews, and have you replied to them?
- In Google Search Console, does the Pages report show your important pages as indexed?
- Has your sitemap been submitted and read successfully?
Trust signals (2 minutes)
Look at your homepage as a sceptical stranger would. Within a few seconds, could they tell what you do, who it is for and why they should trust you?
- The address bar shows a secure connection (HTTPS)
- Real contact details, not just a form
- Recent reviews, testimonials or examples of work
- Prices, ranges or at least a clear explanation of how pricing works
- A privacy policy that reflects what the site actually collects
Accessibility quick wins (2 minutes)
Run your homepage through WebAIM’s free WAVE tool and look at the errors, not the long list of alerts. Then press Tab repeatedly from the top of the page: you should be able to see where you are at every step and reach every link and button without a mouse.
What to do with what you find
Fix in order of commercial impact, not in the order you found things. Broken forms and wrong contact details come first because they lose enquiries today. Visibility problems come next, then speed, then polish.
If the list is long, or the fixes need a developer, that is useful information too — it tells you whether a few targeted changes will do or whether the site has reached its limit.
Where to go next
Sources and further reading
- PageSpeed Insights — Google
- Web Vitals — web.dev (Google)
- Google Search Console — Google
- Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help
- WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool — WebAIM
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