Is the website you have doing its job?

The five questions

Answer them about the site you have today. If you have no site at all, this check is not for you — that is a simpler conversation.

Open your own site on a phone with wifi turned off. How long before you can read something? About a second. It is there before I have looked up Two seconds or so Three or four seconds Five seconds or more, and it moves about as it loads Long enough that I have never actually waited for it

If your phone number changed today, how would it get changed on the site? I would do it myself in a couple of minutes I would do it myself, but it would take a while and I would be nervous I would email whoever built it and wait I would have to pay somebody, and I do not know how much I genuinely do not know who could change it

Search for your trade plus your town, in an incognito window. Where are you? Near the top, in the map results and the ordinary ones In the map results, but the website is further down Somewhere on the first page if I look carefully Second page or beyond I cannot find myself at all

On a phone, how many taps from the first screen to contacting you? One. The phone number is right there and it dials One, but you have to find it first Two or three, past a menu Scroll to the bottom, then a form There is a banner or a pop-up in the way before you can do anything

When did anything on the site last change? This month Within the last six months Sometime last year Two or three years ago It has not changed since it was built, and the year in the footer proves it

0 of 5 answered. Answer all 5 questions to see which of the results below applies to you.

What the answers mean

The site is doing its job. Leave it alone

On these answers there is no case for replacing it. A site that loads quickly, can be edited, is findable and puts your phone number where a thumb is already resting is doing the work. Spending on it now would be spending for the sake of it, and we would rather say so.

Recommended next steps:

Check the same five questions again in a year, or after anything about the business changes.
If one answer was worse than the rest, fix that one thing rather than the whole site.
Make sure your hours and phone number are identical on the site and on your Google Business Profile.

Parts of it are costing you. Fix those first

There is real friction here, but not necessarily a rebuild. Usually one or two specific problems are doing most of the damage — most often speed, or a phone number that is hard to reach on a phone. Both can be worth fixing on the site you already have.

Recommended next steps:

Deal with loading speed before anything else. It costs you the visitor before the rest has a chance to work.
Get a tappable phone number into the first screen on every page.
Remove anything that appears over the content — cookie banners, chat bubbles, newsletter overlays.
If those cannot be changed without paying somebody every time, that is itself the argument for a rebuild.

This is costing you work you never hear about

On these answers people are leaving before they reach anything. The specific loss is invisible — a phone system cannot count the people who did not ring — which is why a site in this state can sit untouched for years while being the most expensive thing the business owns.

Recommended next steps:

Do the phone test yourself before deciding anything: your own site, wifi off, counting out loud. It usually settles the question.
A rebuild keeps every address the current site has, so nothing it already earns is thrown away.
Work out what it would have to bring in to be worth doing, on your own numbers.
If you would rather do none of that, at least get the phone number into the first screen. It is the cheapest change with the largest effect.

Why these five

They are the five things that decide whether a small business website is earning or costing, and each one can be checked in under a minute without any tools.

Speed, because a page that has not appeared cannot do anything else. Google's own threshold for a good loading experience is 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile of real visits (web.dev), and the 75th percentile means your worst quarter of visitors, not your best.
Whether you can change it, because a site nobody can edit stops being true within a year, and everybody can tell.
Whether you can be found, since a site nobody reaches is an expensive business card.
How hard it is to contact you, which is the only thing the site is actually for.
When it last changed, because a visibly abandoned site makes people wonder whether the business is abandoned too.

What this check does not tell you

Whether your site is accessible to somebody using a screen reader, whether it sets cookies it should not, and whether it is structured in a way search engines and AI assistants can read. Those need looking at rather than answering from memory, and we will do it for nothing if you send us the address.

It also cannot tell you what a better site would earn. Nobody can, including us — which is why the calculator asks you for that number rather than supplying one.

Send us the address of the site you just scored and we will tell you honestly what we would and would not change about it.