The DIY Website Audit: Exactly What to Check
(and how to fix it)
Your website has probably been sitting largely untouched for a while. Maybe a few months. Maybe longer — no judgement. Life is busy, your business keeps you occupied, and your website has been quietly doing its thing in the background.
The question is: what exactly has it been doing?
Because a website that hasn't been reviewed in six months or more is almost certainly underperforming in at least a few areas. And the frustrating thing is that most of the issues are completely fixable — often without a designer, often in less time than you'd think.
Here's exactly how to audit your own small business website, what to look for, what you can sort yourself today, and how to know when a tidy-up isn't enough and something bigger is needed.
Start here: the five things to check first
When I look at a client's website for the first time — whether for a full redesign or a quick review — these are the first five things I check. Every single time, in this order.
1. Load speed
Go to Google PageSpeed Insights, paste in your URL, and see what comes back. A score below 70 is a problem worth addressing. Slow websites lose visitors before they've read a single word — and the most common culprit is almost always the same thing: images that are far too large.
More on how to fix that below.
2. Mobile view
Open your website on your actual phone. Not a desktop preview tool, not a browser emulator — your real phone, the way a real visitor would use it. Go through every page. Is the text readable without zooming? Do the buttons work and are they easy to tap? Does anything overlap, cut off, or behave strangely?
Over 60% of your website visitors are on mobile. If the experience isn't good on a small screen, you're losing more than half your potential enquiries before they've even started reading.
3. The five-second test
Open your homepage and ask yourself honestly: within five seconds, can a complete stranger understand what you do, who you help, and what they should do next?
If the answer is no — or even "maybe" — your above-the-fold content needs attention. The very first thing someone sees when they land on your site should answer those three questions immediately and clearly. If it doesn't, most visitors won't stick around long enough to find out more.
4. Your contact form
This one catches people out more than almost anything else. Go to your own contact form right now and submit a test message. Did you receive the notification? Did it arrive at the right email address? Did it arrive at all?
A broken contact form is one of the most common — and most quietly damaging — website problems I find. You could have been missing enquiries for months without knowing it. Check it today.
5. Your backend tools
Is Google Analytics installed and actually collecting data? Is Google Search Console set up with your sitemap submitted? If you ever plan to run ads, is your Meta Pixel on the site?
These tools are not optional extras. They're the things that tell you what's actually happening on your website — which pages people visit, how long they stay, where they come from, and where they drop off. Without them, you're making decisions about your website completely blind.
What you can fix yourself right now
Good news: a lot of the most common website issues are genuinely within your control, no designer required. Here's what you can tackle today.
Compress your images
Large image files are the single biggest reason websites load slowly, and they're very easy to fix. Before uploading any image to your site, run it through TinyPNG or Squoosh — both free, both straightforward. This takes about thirty seconds per image and can reduce file sizes by up to 80% without any visible difference in quality.
If you have existing images on your site that were never compressed, replace them with compressed versions. It's a bit of work upfront, but the improvement to your load speed is immediate and noticeable.
Read through all your copy
Go through every single page on your website and read it properly. Are your services still accurate? Do your prices reflect what you actually charge? Is there anything that says "coming soon" for something that came and went a year ago? Are there references to offers, events, or promotions that are long finished?
Outdated copy is confusing for visitors and signals to Google that your site isn't being maintained. Update anything that no longer reflects your current business.
Check every link
Click every button, every internal link, and every navigation item on your site. Broken links look unprofessional and have a negative impact on your SEO. If you want to speed this up, run your URL through a free tool like deadlinkchecker.com — it'll flag every broken link in one go. Fix or remove anything that isn't working.
Add a clear call to action to every page
Every page on your website should tell the visitor what to do next. Book a call. Send an enquiry. Read this post. See my services. If a visitor reaches the bottom of any page without a clear next step, they'll likely just leave — not because they weren't interested, but because you didn't show them where to go.
Go through each page and make sure there's a specific, visible call to action. This is one of the simplest website fixes there is, and one of the most impactful for a website not converting.
Update your Google Business Profile
This is separate from your website but directly affects how you show up in local search results. Check that your hours, services, contact details, and photos are current. If you haven't touched it in a while, spend fifteen minutes going through it. It's free visibility — and it's worth keeping accurate.
The SEO part of your website audit
While you're in there, your website SEO tips checklist should include a few things that often get overlooked.
Check your meta titles and descriptions
Every page on your website has a meta title and description — the text that shows up when your site appears in Google search results. If yours still read "home — untitled site" or were never filled in at all, that's hurting your visibility.
Log into your Squarespace dashboard, go to the SEO settings for each page, and make sure every title and description is filled in, clear, and includes relevant keywords. Each one should communicate what that page is about and give someone a reason to click.
Add alt text to your images
Alt text is the written description attached to each image on your site. It helps Google understand what's on your pages and makes your website more accessible to people using screen readers. Check that your main images have descriptive, meaningful alt text — not "image 1" or a string of numbers from your camera roll.
Search for yourself on Google
Type your business name into Google. Then type what you do and where you're based — "Squarespace web designer Dublin" or "brand photographer Edinburgh," for example. Are you showing up? Are your page titles and descriptions making sense in the search results, or does Google just show a random URL with no description?
If Google is struggling to understand what your site is about, that's the clearest possible signal that your SEO needs work.
How to tell if a tidy-up is enough — or if you need a full redesign
This is the question I get asked most often during audits, and the honest answer is that it depends on how fundamentally the website is working for your business.
A website audit and tidy-up is probably enough if your site was built reasonably recently and was well-built to begin with, the structure is solid but the content has just gone stale, it looks good and represents your brand well — it just needs some technical attention, and you feel broadly confident that it's in the right shape, just not quite maintained.
A full redesign is likely what you need if you cringe when someone asks for your URL, the design hasn't changed since you first launched and your business has moved on significantly, it doesn't work properly on mobile at all, you have no idea how to update it yourself and you've been avoiding it for months, or it was built poorly to begin with and has never quite done what you needed it to do.
If you're reading that second list and nodding along — a tidy-up won't solve the underlying problem. And that's not a bad thing to know. It's far better to understand that clearly now than to spend time maintaining something that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
A website that's fundamentally the wrong fit for your business is quietly costing you money every single month. A redesign isn't an expense — it's the fix.
Where to start if it all feels a bit overwhelming
You don't have to do everything at once. If you take nothing else from this post, start with these four things today:
Compress your images. Fix your broken links. Update any copy that's out of date. Add a call to action to every page that doesn't have one.
Those four things alone — done properly — can make a real, measurable difference to how your website performs. They cost nothing but a bit of focused time.
And if you go through this audit and realise the issues are bigger than a tidy-up can fix, that's exactly what a discovery call is for. We'll look at your website together, I'll tell you honestly what's working and what isn't, and you'll leave with a clear picture of what the right next step is — whether that's a few tweaks you can make yourself or a full rebuild.
Book your free discovery call at MSE Digital Designs and let's find out exactly where your website stands.
