The 7 Things I Check on Every Website Tune-Up (and What I Find)

Every website tune-up I do starts the same way: I open the site like a customer would and start poking around. No judgment, no lecture. Just a careful look at what is working, what is tired, and what is quietly costing the business customers.

After doing this for years, I can tell you the same seven things come up again and again. Not exotic problems. Not rare edge cases. The same handful of totally normal, totally fixable things. If you have ever wondered what is actually wrong with your website, this is probably the list.

1. How fast it loads on a phone

This is the first thing I check and the most common problem I find. Most of your visitors are on a phone, and phones are unforgiving. Google found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load, and the chance of someone bouncing goes up 32% when load time stretches from one second to three.

Portent analyzed 24 million page views and found that a site loading in one second converts about two and a half times better than one loading in five seconds. Deloitte, in a study commissioned by Google, found that shaving just a tenth of a second off mobile load time lifted retail conversions by 8.4%.

What I usually find: giant uncompressed photos, often straight off someone’s phone, and a pile of plugins loading scripts nobody remembers installing. Images are the single biggest culprit on small business sites. Compressing them is often an afternoon’s work and the biggest speed win available.

2. Whether the software is actually up to date

WordPress powers a huge share of small business websites, and WordPress itself is rarely the problem. The plugins are. Patchstack’s 2026 security report counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, a 42% jump from the year before, and 91% of them lived in plugins. Nearly half had no fix available when they were publicly disclosed, and the typical gap between disclosure and mass automated attacks was about five hours.

The fix is beautifully boring: keep things updated, delete the plugins you do not use (deactivated is not the same as deleted), and turn on two-factor authentication for admin accounts. This is maintenance, like changing the oil. Ignore it for a year or two and the small stuff stops being small.

3. Whether the connection is secure

Almost every site has an SSL certificate these days, so the missing padlock is rarer than it used to be. What I find instead are the quieter versions: certificates that expired without anyone noticing, or pages that load some images and scripts over plain old HTTP while the rest of the page is secure. Browsers notice. They flag it, sometimes subtly, sometimes with a full warning page.

Visitors may not know what mixed content means, but they know what uneasy feels like. A certificate check and cleanup is quick, and it is one of those things that should simply never be left to chance.

4. Whether the contact form works (and how long it is)

For most service businesses, the contact form is the whole ballgame. It is where a visitor becomes a lead. So I always test it: fill it out, hit send, and see what happens. You would be surprised how often the answer is nothing. The notification goes to an old email address. It lands in spam. The form was broken by an update six months ago and nobody noticed.

Then I count the fields. Every extra field is a little more friction, and friction is where leads go to die. HubSpot’s analysis of more than 40,000 landing pages found that short forms, around three fields, convert best. Name, email, and a message box will carry most small businesses further than a twelve-field interrogation. You can always ask follow-up questions after someone raises their hand.

5. Whether Google knows the business exists

This one surprises people. Your website does not live alone; it lives next to your Google Business Profile, and for local businesses that profile is often the first thing a customer ever sees. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found that 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, 68% will not use a business rated under four stars, and nearly a third now insist on four and a half or better.

What I find: profiles that were claimed years ago and never touched again. Wrong hours. Old photos. No link back to the website, or a website with no link to the profile. Ten minutes of cleanup here routinely outperforms months of fancier marketing, because this is where the customers already are.

6. How it behaves on a small screen

Related to speed, but a separate check. I pull the site up on my phone and try to do what a customer would do: can I find the hours, the phone number, and a way to get in touch in under a minute? Text that requires pinching and zooming. Buttons too small to tap. Menus that do not open. Roughly half of all websites still fail Google’s basic mobile performance standards, so if yours struggles here, you are in crowded company.

Most mobile problems are visible within about thirty seconds of looking, which means they are usually straightforward to describe and fix. If I stumble, your customers are stumbling too, and now we know exactly where.

7. Whether a visitor knows what to do next

Last one, and it is the most human of the seven. Plenty of sites look great and read well, and then just stop. No clear button. No obvious next step. Three competing calls to action fighting for attention. A homepage works more like a conversation than a brochure, and every conversation needs a gentle nudge toward what happens next. One clear button, Call or Book or Get a Quote, does more work than another paragraph about your process.

While I am here I also look for staleness: last year’s holiday banner, a blog that ends in 2023, a team photo of people who left two jobs ago. But fresh dates and real photos quietly tell people you are open, active, and paying attention, and that matters more than most owners realize.

What this usually adds up to

Almost everything on this list is fixable, and most of it is not a rebuild. Most of it is an afternoon or two of focused work, not a five-figure project. The bigger jobs, like a full speed overhaul or rebuilding a site on a bloated theme, are real, but most sites never need them.

And if reading this list made you a little embarrassed about the state of your own site, please hear this: you are in enormous company. Nearly every small business owner I meet feels some version of that. You have been busy running the actual business. The website sat, the way the garage sits when you are busy living your life. There is nothing shameful about it, and there is nothing about it that cannot be fixed.

That is exactly what my Year-End Website Tune-Up is for. I work through this whole checklist plus the technical bits underneath, and hand your site back ready for the season. I am taking 8 of them, and booking closes October 31. You can reach me here.