Most business owners in the Valley have no idea whether their website is any good. They know roughly when it was built and who built it. They have not looked at it on a phone, as a stranger would, in a long time. That is not a criticism. You have a business to run, and the site mostly sits there being quiet.
The trouble is that quiet looks the same whether the site is working or not. So here is the checklist I run first on any site, cut down to what you can do yourself with free tools in about twenty minutes. Set a timer and keep a pen handy. Be honest with the answers, because nobody else is going to see them.
How do I check if my website is any good?
Look at it the way a new customer does: search your business name on Google, open the site on your phone over cellular data, run it through PageSpeed Insights, send yourself a message through the contact form, and check your Google Business Profile. Those five checks catch most of the problems that cost a small business calls.
None of these need technical knowledge. They need you to stop looking at your site as the owner and start looking at it as someone who has never heard of you and has three other options open in the next tab.
Minutes 0 to 3: Google your own business name
Open a private browser window so your own history does not colour the results. Search your business name plus your town, the way a customer would. The name on your sign, not the full legal name with "Inc." on the end.
Write down what you see:
- Is your website the first result, or is it a directory, an old listing, or a Facebook page you forgot about?
- Does your Google Business Profile panel show up, with the right hours and phone number?
- Do the reviews have replies from you, or are they sitting there unanswered?
- Does anything show up that you did not put there? An old address, a closed location, a competitor's ad on your name?
If a directory outranks your own site for your own name, pay attention. It usually means Google does not have much reason to trust the site yet.
Minutes 3 to 7: the phone test
Pick up your phone. Turn off Wi-Fi so you are on cellular data like most people who find you from a truck or a parking lot. Load your site and count.
Google has indexed the web by its mobile version since it finished the switch to mobile-first indexing in October 2023. The phone version of your site is the version Google judges. It is also the version most of your customers see first.
Answer these without scrolling:
- Within five seconds, can you tell what the business does and where it is?
- Can you read the text without pinching to zoom?
- Does the phone number dial when you tap it?
- Does the menu open, and does every link in it go somewhere real?
- Does anything jump around the screen while the page loads, so you tap the wrong thing?
That last one is more common than people think. A banner loads late, the page shifts down, and your thumb lands on an ad or the wrong button. It feels minor. To a customer it feels broken.
Minutes 7 to 11: run PageSpeed Insights
Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste in your home page address, and run it. It is Google's own free tool. Leave it on the Mobile tab.
The results come in two parts, and people mix them up. The top section is real-user data from Chrome, collected over the previous 28 days. The bottom section, with the big coloured score, is a simulated test on a mid-range phone. Google's documentation (updated October 2024) calls these field data and lab data. Plenty of small local sites do not get enough visits to have field data at all, and the top section will say so. That is normal. Use the lab score.
For the lab score, 90 or above is good, 50 to 89 needs work, and under 50 is poor. If you do have field data, the three numbers that matter are the Core Web Vitals. Google's published thresholds are:
| Metric | What it measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | How long until the main content shows up | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP | How fast the page reacts when you tap something | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS | How much the page jumps around while loading | 0.1 or less |
Do not chase a perfect 100. A score in the 90s on mobile is a well-built site. A score in the 30s is a site that is losing people before they see anything. I walked through each of these numbers in more detail in how to read your Core Web Vitals.
Minutes 11 to 14: send yourself a message
This is the check I care most about, and the one almost nobody does. Go to your own contact page and fill in the form. Use a personal email address that is not the one the form sends to, so you can see both ends. Put "TEST" in the message.
Then check:
- Did the form say it sent? Did it show a clear confirmation, or just clear itself and leave you guessing?
- Did the message arrive in your business inbox? Check the spam folder too.
- How long did it take?
- If it is supposed to send the customer a copy or an automatic reply, did that arrive?
A form that looks fine and delivers nothing is the most expensive problem a small business site can have, because it fails silently. Nobody calls to tell you your form is broken. They assume you never answered and they call the next name on the list. While you are there, tap the email address on your contact page and make sure it opens a new message addressed to the right place.
Minutes 14 to 17: check your Google Business Profile
Search your business name again, or open Google Maps and find yourself. This time look at the profile itself, not the search results around it.
- Are the hours right, including any holiday or seasonal changes?
- Is the primary category as specific as it can be?
- Does the website button go to your site, and to the right page?
- Are the photos yours and recent, or three years old, or uploaded by a customer at a bad angle?
Your profile often gets seen before your website does. I made the full case for it in why your Google Business Profile matters more than your website. For today, you only need to know whether it is accurate.
Minutes 17 to 20: the quick trust and access checks
The last three minutes are for small things that tell a visitor whether anyone is still minding the shop.
- Look at the address bar. If your browser marks the site "Not secure," it is not running on HTTPS, and visitors see that warning before they see your name.
- Scroll to the footer. What year does the copyright say? Are there events, prices, or staff listed that are no longer true?
- On a computer, click in the address bar and press Tab repeatedly. You should be able to see where you are on the page and reach every link and button. If the highlight disappears or gets stuck, people who cannot use a mouse cannot use your site.
For a free automated look at accessibility, run your home page through WAVE, a checker from WebAIM. Do not panic at the number of flags. WebAIM's 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages found detectable accessibility failures on 95.9% of them, with low-contrast text alone on 83.9%. You are in large company. The point is to know which problems you have. I broke down what the standard asks for in what WCAG 2.1 AA means for a small business.
What do I do with the results?
Count the problems you wrote down and sort them into two piles: things you can fix yourself this week, and things that need whoever manages the site. Wrong hours, old photos, an unanswered review and a stale footer year are all yours. A form that does not deliver, a mobile score under 50, or a site that fails the phone test are build problems.
If you came out with one or two small items, your site is in better shape than most. Fix them and run this again in six months. If the form failed or the phone test went badly, do not ignore that. Those two cost the most, and they cost you quietly, because every lost customer is someone you never hear from.
Twenty minutes gets you the picture. If you want a second pair of eyes on it, I do a free website audit that goes further than this list: speed, accessibility, technical search setup and local search signals, written up in plain language. Send me your address and I will tell you straight what I find.