The 20-Minute January Website Checkup
January 5th, 2027 by admin
January is when everyone makes plans. Gyms fill up, budgets get written, and the website gets added to a list somewhere. Then February arrives and nobody has looked at it.
Here is a better ritual. Set a timer for twenty minutes and walk through your own site the way a customer would. You do not need to know how anything works. You just need to use it and notice what feels wrong.
This is the same short list we run through when a client asks us to look at their site. Almost every problem it finds is a small thing that has been sitting there for months.
Start on Your Phone, Not Your Computer
Most people who visit your website will do it on a phone. Open it on yours, and turn off Wi-Fi so you are using the same network a customer would use in a parking lot.
Ask three questions. Can I read the text without pinching? Can I reach the menu with one thumb? Are the buttons big enough to tap without hitting the one next to them? If the answer is no to any of those, you have found your first project.
Click Every Link in the Menu
Open the menu and click each item. Then scroll to the footer and click the ones down there too. Broken links are more common than people expect, especially after a page gets renamed or an old promotion ends.
While you are there, look for anything that dates the site. A banner for a sale that ended in 2024, a staff page with someone who left, a "new location" announcement that is now three years old. None of these break the site, but all of them tell a visitor that nobody is paying attention.
Send Yourself a Message
Fill out your own contact form and send it. Then check that it actually arrived. Look in the inbox it is supposed to go to, and look in the spam folder too.
A form that silently fails is one of the worst problems a website can have, because nobody notices. The visitor thinks they reached you. You think the phone is just quiet. We have seen this go on for months at otherwise healthy businesses.
When the message does arrive, read it as a customer would. Does it look like a form, or does it look like a person wrote it? Does it tell the sender what happens next?
Read the First Screen as a Stranger
Cover everything except the top of the homepage. Now read what is left. Can you tell what this business does, who it helps, and where it is located? Can you see a phone number without scrolling?
You know what you sell, so your brain fills in gaps that a stranger cannot. This is the hardest check to do honestly. If you are unsure, show the page to someone who does not work with you and ask them what the business does.
Check the Facts That Rot
Every business website has facts that quietly go stale. Hours change. Prices change. People leave. Insurance plans change. The phone number in the header gets replaced and the one in the footer does not.
Walk through the basics:
- Hours, including holiday hours that no longer apply
- Address and phone number, everywhere they appear
- Staff names and roles
- Prices, starting rates, and service descriptions
- Any date, year, or seasonal message
Correcting these takes minutes and prevents a customer from showing up at the wrong time.
Look at Your Three Most Important Pages
Most businesses have three pages that matter more than the rest: the service or product page, the about page, and the contact page. Open each one and read it all the way through.
Do they describe the business you run today? Is there anything you have stopped offering? Is there anything new you have started offering but never added? A website that is six months out of date is not a disaster, but it is a missed opportunity every single day.
Test the One Thing You Most Want People to Do
Every website has a main job. Book an appointment. Request a quote. Buy a product. Call. Whatever yours is, do it yourself, on your phone, from start to finish.
If it takes more than a minute, if a page loads slowly, if you have to create an account you did not expect, or if the confirmation is confusing, fix that before anything else. This is the path your best customers take.
Ask Someone Else to Try It
Hand your phone to a friend or employee who does not use the site. Ask them to find a specific piece of information, like your hours or a service you offer. Watch where they go and where they hesitate. Do not help them.
Five minutes of watching someone else use your site is worth more than an hour of guessing. You will see the thing you have stopped noticing.
Write Down What You Found
Keep a simple list. Mark each item as fix now, fix this quarter, or ignore. Most of what you find will be a text change, a photo swap, or a link update. A few things may need a developer, and that is fine.
The point of the checkup is not to make the site perfect. It is to stop the slow drift that makes a good website feel abandoned. Twenty minutes in January is cheaper than losing a customer in March because the form was broken since November.
Make It a Habit
Put a reminder on your calendar for the first week of every quarter. Run the same list. The second time takes ten minutes, because you know where everything is.
If you would rather have someone else do it, that is what our website optimization work is for. We go through the site, fix what is broken, and tell you plainly what we changed. Get in touch and we will take a look. Because at the end of the day, we don't just build websites - we build your business.