The five checks we run on every site, before anything else

Load your site on your phone, on mobile data, with wi-fi switched off

Count the seconds until you can actually read something. Over three and you're losing roughly half your visitors before they've seen a word — and they don't bounce dramatically, they just never arrive, so nothing in your analytics tells you it happened.

If it's slow, oversized images are the cause about eight times in ten. That's a compression job, not a rebuild. Test on your own phone rather than a desktop speed tool: your office wi-fi is not what your customers are using.

Find your enquiry form and fill it in yourself, as a stranger would

All the way through. Count the fields, count the clicks it took from your homepage to reach it, and then check that the email actually arrives — including in the spam folder.

Broken or silently failing enquiry forms are the single most common thing we find, and they have usually been broken for months. Every field you can remove raises completion; every extra click before the form loses people who were ready.

Open your homepage on a laptop and read only what's visible without scrolling

From that alone, can a stranger tell what you do, who you do it for, and what to do next? If working it out requires scrolling, most visitors won't do the work.

One clear sentence beats a rotating slideshow every time. The test is whether someone outside your industry could repeat your offer back to you after four seconds of looking — so ask someone, rather than deciding for yourself.

Open Events Manager and check what your conversion event actually fires on

If it fires on a page view rather than a submitted form, then every number you have been reporting is inflated — routinely by three or four times. Anyone who clicked, landed, read for four seconds and left has been counted as a conversion.

Fix this before you spend another pound. More budget against a wrong signal doesn't just waste money, it teaches the platform to find you more of the wrong people, and that takes weeks to un-teach. While you're in there, check whether two pixels are installed — an old tag manager container alongside a hard-coded one is common after any site rebuild, and it double-counts everything.

Google your main service, in a private window, and see who's above you

Use a private window so your own history isn't flattering you. Note whether you appear at all, then open the pages ranking above you and put yours beside them.

Usually the difference isn't budget. It's that their page is genuinely about that one service — named in the title, the heading and the body — while yours mentions it in a list of six things you offer. One page per service you actually want to be found for does more than a year of general blog posts.

Do those and you're ahead of most of your competitors

Not because the checks are clever — they aren't — but because almost nobody runs them. Every one of these five has been sitting broken on somebody's site for a year while they argued about their logo.