Website audit checklist for small businesses: 30 checks that bring in more enquiries

1. Can a visitor who wants to hire you actually do it?

• A clear call to action on the first screen of your homepage — on a phone, without scrolling.
• A contact form that asks only what you need (name, email, a message). Every extra field costs enquiries.
• Your phone number as text, tappable on mobile (a tel: link), not an image.
• Your email address visible, or a form that works and confirms it was sent.
• Proof: reviews, testimonials, logos of clients, credentials, photos of real work.
• An instant option for people ready now: online booking, live chat or WhatsApp.

2. Can search engines find and present you?

• A unique, descriptive title on every page, 50–60 characters, with what you do and where.
• A meta description of 120–160 characters that reads like an ad.
• One H1 per page that says what the page is about.
• Not blocked: no noindex tag on pages you want found, and robots.txt not blocking the site.
• An XML sitemap listed in robots.txt and submitted in Google Search Console.
• A canonical URL on each page so www/non-www and tracking parameters don't split your ranking.
• Structured data (schema.org LocalBusiness or Organization) with your name, address, phone and hours.
• A complete, verified Google Business Profile that matches the details on your site.

3. Is it fast?

Google's Core Web Vitals are the standard. Aim for the "good" thresholds measured on a mobile phone:

• Server response under 600 ms.
• Images in WebP or AVIF, sized for the screen, lazy-loaded below the fold, with width and height set.
• Few third-party scripts — every chat widget, tracker and font service costs load time.
• Compression (Brotli or gzip) and sensible caching.

4. Does it work on a phone?

More than half of small business site visits come from phones. Open your site on one and check:

• Nothing scrolls sideways.
• Buttons and links are at least 24×24 pixels with space between them (WCAG 2.2) — 44px is better.
• Body text is at least 16px; nothing important is under 12px.
• Text contrast meets 4.5:1 against its background.
• Zoom isn't disabled in the viewport settings.
• Forms use the right keyboards (email, phone, number) and have visible labels.

5. Is it secure and trustworthy?

• HTTPS everywhere, with HSTS so browsers never fall back to plain HTTP.
• No mixed content (images or scripts loaded over http:// on a secure page).
• Security headers: Content-Security-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, frame protection, Referrer-Policy.
• Plugins, themes and libraries up to date — outdated WordPress plugins and old jQuery versions are the most common way small business sites get hacked.
• SPF and DMARC records on your domain, so nobody can send convincing emails pretending to be you.
• A privacy policy, and a cookie banner that gives a real choice if you serve visitors in the EU or UK.

6. Is there a reason to come back?

Most visitors won't buy on the first visit. Give them a way to stay in touch — a newsletter, useful guides, social profiles — and a site structure that makes the next page obvious. Fresh, genuinely helpful content is also what lets you rank for the hundreds of specific questions your customers search.

Fix the high-impact items first: anything that stops people contacting you, anything that stops Google indexing you, and anything that makes the site slow or broken on a phone.