Here is the problem with judging your own website. You go to it by typing half the address and letting the browser finish. You land on it already knowing what the business does, what the prices are, and that the photograph on the homepage was taken on a wet Tuesday in March. You cannot see it. Nobody who has ever owned a website can see their own.
A customer arrives differently. They have four other tabs open, three of them your competitors. They are on a phone, one handed, somewhere with poor signal. They did not search for you by name, because they did not know your name. They will give you about twenty seconds before going back to the search results, and they will never tell you why they left.
So this is a way of borrowing their eyes for five minutes. It is not a design critique and there is nothing in it about colours. It is eight things a stranger is trying to work out, in roughly the order they try to work them out, and whether your site answers them before they give up asking.
The eight questions
0of 8
Nothing ticked yetOpen your own site on your phone and work down the list.
0 of 8 ticked. Nothing ticked yet.
Tick the ones your site passes. Nothing is sent anywhere and nobody sees it but you, so be harsh with it. Six or more is a good site. Three or fewer is quietly costing you work every week.
What your score actually means
Six, seven or eight and the site is doing its job. If enquiries are still thin, the problem is upstream: not enough people are reaching it in the first place, which is a search and reviews problem rather than a website problem, and rebuilding the site will not touch it.
Four or five is the most common result and the most frustrating, because the site is nearly right. Usually one or two of the failures are doing all the damage, and they are almost always the contact question and the price question. Both are fixable in an afternoon on a site that already exists.
Three or fewer usually means the site was built to be filled in rather than to be read. That is not a criticism of you. It is what a template does: it hands you a shape to pour text into, and that shape was drawn to suit a thousand different businesses, which means it was drawn to suit none of them.
A site does not have to be beautiful to pass this. It has to be honest, quick, and easy to act on.
The one everybody argues about
Price. The objection is always the same and it is a fair one: every job is different, so a number on the website is either wrong or it frightens people off.
Except the number is already in their head. They arrived carrying a figure they are afraid it might be, and if you say nothing, that figure stands unchallenged. Somebody who cannot afford you leaves either way. The one you lose by staying silent is the person who could have afforded you comfortably and never found out.
A starting figure plus an honest sentence about what moves it does the work. It is why our own pricing page leads with what changes the number rather than with the number, and why every price on it says from.
If you want a second opinion
Run the test, then send us the two you failed. We will tell you whether they are worth fixing on the site you have got or whether you are propping something up. Sometimes the honest answer is that a tidy up buys you another two years, and we would rather say that than sell you a website you did not need.