How to Audit Your Own Website in an Hour (No Tools Required)

Why do this before hiring anyone

You'll negotiate better, spot a bad agency faster, and possibly fix your biggest problem for free. Set aside an hour. Use your phone, not your desktop — that's where your customers are.

Part 1: The five-second test (10 minutes)

Open your homepage on your phone. Without scrolling, answer:

Is it obvious what you do?
Is it obvious who it's for, and where you operate?
Can you contact them in one tap?

If any answer is no, that's your biggest problem — and no amount of traffic fixes it.

Part 2: The conversion path (15 minutes)

Submit your own enquiry form. Did the email arrive? Check spam. You'd be astonished how often this fails silently.
Call your own number from the site. Does it work? Does it go where you expect?
Count the form fields. Could you remove any and still call the person back? Remove them.
Look for proof. Reviews, photos, case studies, credentials. If a stranger landed here, why would they trust you?

Part 3: Speed (5 minutes)

Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights. Ignore the overall score and look at one number: LCP on mobile. Over 2.5 seconds means you're losing people before they see your offer. It's usually oversized images.

Part 4: Search visibility (15 minutes)

Google your business name. Do you appear? Is your Business Profile complete, with recent reviews?
Google your main service plus your city (in an incognito window). Where are you? Who's above you? Open their pages — what do they have that you don't?
Search site:yourdomain.co.nz. This shows what Google has indexed. Fewer pages than you expected means indexing problems. Far more means you may have junk pages.

Part 5: The honest questions (15 minutes)

Does every service you sell have its own page?
Does the site name every town and suburb you actually serve?
Can you tell where last month's leads came from? If not, that's your first fix.
Is anything on your site untrue or out of date? Old prices, stale offers, credentials you no longer hold?

What to do with the results

Rank them by cost to fix and value if fixed. Almost always the order is: fix the form, fix the mobile clarity, fix the images, complete the Business Profile, set up tracking. Most of that is free and takes a day. Only then is it worth paying for traffic.

Want a second opinion? Book a free discovery session — we'll run the same audit properly and tell you what we'd do, whether or not you hire us.