The ten-point check to run before you pay anyone to redesign your website

Before you spend anything on a redesign, spend an hour finding out whether you need one. Roughly half the businesses who come to us convinced their website is broken have a site with three fixable problems and a fourth problem that is not the website at all. The other half genuinely do need to start again, and they save money by knowing exactly why.

This is the diagnostic half of the paid audit we sell, written so you can run it yourself. Every tool below is free. Every threshold is a real number rather than a feeling. Work down the list, mark each one pass or fail, and the scoring at the bottom tells you what you are looking at.

The ten checks

1. 01

   Does it load in under 2.5 seconds on a phone?

   Tool: Google PageSpeed Insights. Enter your home page and read the *mobile* tab, then repeat for your most important other page, the one people actually land on from search.

   Pass: Largest Contentful Paint at or under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint at or under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift at or under 0.1. Read the "Discover what your real users are experiencing" panel at the top before the lab score underneath. The field data is what Google actually uses and what your customers actually feel.

   Why it matters: conversion rates fall from around 3% at a one-second load to under 0.5% at five seconds, and every extra 100 milliseconds costs roughly 1% of conversions. This is not an SEO detail. It is money leaving before anyone sees your work.

   If you fail: the cause is almost always images. Unsized, uncompressed hero images are the single most common reason a small business site is slow, followed by a page builder loading five fonts and a carousel nobody scrolls. Both are repairs, not redesigns, usually a few hundred dollars.

2. 02

   Can a stranger say what you do in five seconds?

   Tool: a person who does not know your business. Show them your home page for five seconds, take it away, and ask three things: what does this company do, who is it for, and what would you do next?

   Pass: all three answered correctly, without hedging, by two different people.

   Why it matters: this is the cheapest test in the list and the one that most often fails. Businesses write home pages for people who already know them. A visitor arriving from a search does not know your product names, your internal vocabulary, or why your process is different.

   If you fail: it is a copy problem, not a design problem, and no redesign will fix it. Put what you do, who for, and where, in plain words, above the fold. "Custom cabinetry for Austin homes, built in our East Side shop" beats "Crafting Timeless Spaces" every time and costs nothing.

3. 03

   Is the next step obvious on every screen?

   Tool: your own site, scrolled slowly, on a phone. On every screenful, ask: if someone decided right now, what would they tap?

   Pass: there is always a visible action within a thumb's reach, it is the same action throughout, and on mobile your phone number is a tappable link rather than typed-out text.

   Why it matters: most small business sites have one call-to-action at the top, one in the footer, and nothing in between, so a visitor who becomes convinced in the middle of the page has to go looking, and a meaningful share of them simply do not.

   If you fail: pick one primary action for the whole site and repeat it. Five different actions competing on one page is the same as none.

4. 04

   Does the phone version actually work?

   Tool: a real phone, on cellular data, not your desk browser resized. Borrow a second one if you can, ideally an older Android.

   Pass: no sideways scrolling anywhere, nothing overlapping, every tap target comfortably hittable with a thumb, forms that bring up the right keyboard, and no pop-up that appears before the page has finished loading.

   Why it matters: the majority of local searches happen on a phone, frequently outside on a bad connection. A site that is fine on a 27-inch monitor and unusable in a car park is losing the customer who was closest to buying.

   If you fail: note whether it is cosmetic (things overlap) or structural (the navigation cannot be opened, the form cannot be completed). Cosmetic is a repair. Structural on a modern site usually means the theme was never really built for mobile, and that is a rebuild argument.

5. 05

   Do your forms actually arrive?

   Tool: the form, and an email address you own that is not connected to the business.

   Pass: you submit it, you see a clear confirmation, and the message lands in the right inbox within two minutes, not in spam. Test every form, including the one in the footer everybody forgets.

   Why it matters: this is the quietest and most expensive failure on the list. Forms break when a domain moves, when email authentication changes, when a plugin updates, and the failure mode is silence. Nobody complains that their enquiry vanished. They just go to whoever answers.

   If you fail: fix it today, before anything else on this page. Then set a calendar reminder to test it every quarter, and after any change to your site, domain or email.

6. 06

   Can Google find and read your pages?

   Tool: Google Search Console (free, and if you do not have it set up, that is finding number one). As a rough check without it, search Google for site:yourdomain.com.

   Pass: roughly the number of pages you expect are indexed; the Pages report shows no large group of excluded URLs you cannot explain; every important page has a distinct title and description; and Search Console shows real queries, not just your own business name.

   Why it matters: ranking is a later problem. Being indexed is the prerequisite, and sites fail here more often than owners expect. A stray noindex left over from a staging site can hide a business from search for a year without any visible symptom.

   If you fail: if only your brand name brings you up, you are being found by people who already know you and by nobody else. That is a content and structure problem, and it is the single largest untapped opportunity on most small business sites.

7. 07

   Is your Google Business Profile doing the local work?

   Tool: Google, searched from a phone, ideally not at your own address. Look at the map pack, the three results above the normal listings.

   Pass: you appear for your main service plus your area; your primary category is exactly right; hours, phone and address are current; there are photographs from this year; and you have recent reviews you have replied to.

   Why it matters: for a local business the profile often outperforms the website for discovery. Whitespark's 2026 survey puts Google Business Profile signals at about 32% of local pack ranking weight, with the primary category the single strongest factor, and eight of the top ten local pack signals originate from the profile rather than the site.

   And the reviews half: 97% of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business, 41% now say they *always* do, and 31% will only consider businesses rated 4.5 stars or higher. Recency has tightened sharply too. A third of consumers now want reviews from the last fortnight. A wall of five-star reviews from 2023 reads as a business that has stopped.

   If you fail: this is the highest-return hour on the whole list and it costs nothing. Fix the category, add photographs, and ask five recent customers for a review this week.

8. 08

   Can someone using a keyboard or a screen reader use it?

   Tool: the free WebAIM WAVE browser extension, plus five minutes with your own keyboard. Put the mouse down, press Tab repeatedly, and try to reach the navigation, the main links, and the contact form.

   Pass: you can see where you are at every step, you can reach and complete the form, and WAVE reports no contrast errors, no missing alt text, no unlabelled form inputs and no empty links or buttons.

   Why it matters: two reasons, and the second is not the important one. Customers with disabilities are customers. And separately: plaintiffs filed 4,928 web accessibility lawsuits in 2025, with roughly two-thirds of defendants under $25 million in revenue. The 2026 WebAIM Million found detectable failures on 95.9% of the top million home pages, averaging 56 errors each, so a clean result here genuinely distinguishes you.

   If you fail: six issue types account for around 96% of all detected errors: low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, and a missing document language. All six are cheap to fix and none require a redesign.

9. 09

   Are you measuring anything at all?

   Tool: your analytics, whichever you have. If the answer is "I think we have Google Analytics", open it.

   Pass: analytics installed and collecting; you can see which pages people land on and which they leave from; and (the part almost everyone misses) form submissions and phone taps are tracked as events, so you can say how many enquiries the site produced last month.

   Why it matters: without conversion tracking you cannot tell a traffic problem from a persuasion problem, and those have opposite solutions. Businesses spend thousands on more traffic when the actual failure is that 400 people a month arrive and two of them can find the booking link.

   If you fail: set this up before you commission anything. It is an afternoon, and without it you will have no way to know whether the redesign you are about to buy worked.

10. 10

    Is the content still true?

    Tool: read your own site properly, start to finish. Most owners have not done this in two years.

    Pass: the services listed are the services you want to sell; prices, hours and staff are current; the work shown is work you would show today; there is no copyright date from three years ago; and nothing promises something you have stopped doing.

    Why it matters: stale content undermines trust more efficiently than dated design does. A visitor who spots one thing that is obviously out of date will reasonably wonder what else is.

    If you fail: notice *how* it failed. Small corrections are an afternoon. But if the site describes a business you no longer run, no amount of editing will fix that, and this is the one finding on the list that genuinely justifies starting again.

Scoring it

Count your failures. Then read the row you land in, honestly, including the last column.

The three fixes that usually pay for themselves

If you do nothing else on this page, do these. In our experience they return more than anything else you can buy for the money.

1. Test your forms and fix them. Free. The most expensive silent failure there is.
2. Compress your images and give them explicit dimensions. A few hundred dollars at most, and it is usually the difference between a four-second load and a two-second one.
3. Fix your Google Business Profile category and ask five customers for reviews. Free, one hour, and for a local business it typically moves more than the website does.

What this check cannot tell you

Being straight about the limits: this list is diagnostic, not strategic. It will tell you whether your site is broken. It will not tell you whether it is persuasive, whether you are priced correctly, whether the right people are finding you, or whether your competitors are simply better at explaining themselves. Those need judgement and a look at your actual numbers, which is what the paid version is for, and you should not pay for that until you have run this and found it insufficient.

When you do get to the point of spending, the two companion pieces cover the rest: what a small business website actually costs in Austin, and twelve questions to ask a web designer, with what a good answer sounds like.

Sources

• web.dev: Core Web Vitals and the business impact of Core Web Vitals, for the thresholds and the case studies.
• Portent: Core Web Vitals impact on traffic and conversions, for load time against conversion rate.
• WebAIM Million, 2026, for failure rates and the six dominant error types.
• UsableNet: 2025 Year-End Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report, for the 2025 lawsuit count.
• BrightLocal: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, for review reading, star-rating thresholds and recency.
• Whitespark / BrightLocal: Local Search Ranking Factors, for Google Business Profile weighting.