How to tell if your website was built properly
You paid somebody to build your website. It arrived, it looked nice, you said thanks. Since then you have quietly wondered whether it is any good, and you have had no way to find out.
That is not a gap in your knowledge. It is a gap in the market. Your designer has no reason to grade their own homework, your friends will say it looks great because that is what friends say, and the free tools that claim to check a website answer in language written for the people who build them.
So here are seven checks you can do yourself. No tools, no downloads, no logins. About twenty minutes. None of them require you to understand anything technical, because all seven are about whether your website does its job, not how it was made.
Before you start, one thing worth saying out loud: "it looks nice" is the least useful test there is. Design is the part you can judge and the part designers compete on, so it is usually the part that is fine. The things that lose you customers are almost always invisible on the screen you are looking at.
Check 1. Open it on your own phone, on mobile data
Not your laptop. Not your office wifi. Your phone, with wifi switched off.
Most people will only ever see your website this way, and it is the version almost nobody tests. Turn wifi off, open your site, and count how long before you can read something. If it is more than about three seconds, you are losing people, and the ones you lose are the ones who found you through a search rather than already knowing your name.
Then scroll the whole way down. You are looking for text running off the side, buttons too close together to tap cleanly, and anything you have to pinch to read.
Check 2. Try to contact yourself
Fill in your own inquiry form, as a stranger would, and send it.
Then wait and see what actually happens. Does an email arrive? Where does it go? Is it an inbox somebody reads every day, or one that was set up during the build and forgotten? Did the person filling it in get any confirmation, or did the page just go blank?
This is the single most common expensive fault on a small business website, and it is invisible, because a broken form looks exactly like a form nobody used. Do this one every few months forever, not just once.
If you take bookings or payments, do the same. Book yourself in. Buy something.
Check 3. Search for your own business name
Type your business name and your town into Google.
You should be the first result. If you are not, or you are below a directory listing, that is worth knowing. Then search for what you actually sell plus your town, the way a customer who has never heard of you would type it, and see how far down you have to scroll.
Not being there is not proof of anything on its own, especially for a site under six months old. But not appearing for your own business name is a real problem, and it usually has a small fixable cause rather than a large one.
Check 4. Check every phone number and address on the site
Tap the phone number on your phone. Does it dial the right number?
Read the opening hours. Are they this year's? Read the address. Is it where you are now? Check any prices. Are they the prices you charge today?
This sounds too simple to matter. It is the fault that costs the most customers per minute of effort to fix, because a wrong phone number does not look wrong. It looks like a phone number.
Check 5. Look at the padlock
Look at the very start of the address bar. You want a padlock or a plain address, and you do not want the words "Not secure".
If it says not secure, visitors are being warned about your business by their own browser before they read a word you wrote. It is usually cheap or free to fix, and it usually means a certificate expired rather than anything sinister. But nobody tells you, because the person seeing the warning is not going to call you about it. They are going to leave.
Check 6. Ask someone who has never seen it
Find somebody who does not know your business. Show them the home page for five seconds, then take it away, then ask them two questions: what does this business do, and where is it?
If they cannot answer both, your home page is not doing the job. This is almost never a design problem. It is usually that the page opens with something like "Welcome to our website" or a slogan, and says what you actually do somewhere further down where a stranger never reaches.
Check 7. Count the clicks to the thing you want them to do
Decide what you most want a visitor to do. Call you, book, buy, or send a message. One thing.
Now start at the home page and count the taps it takes to get there. One or two is good. Three is worth fixing. Four or more and most people never arrive.
Then check that the same route works on your phone, because the button that sits beside the menu on a laptop often ends up buried inside it on a phone.
What these seven checks do not cover
Being straight about the limits, because a list that claims to be complete when it is not is worse than no list.
These seven find the faults that cost you customers today and that you can see without knowing anything technical. They will not find a page that loads slowly only for some visitors, a form that works for you and fails for someone on a different phone, text nobody can read because of the color it sits on, or a page Google has quietly stopped showing.
Those faults exist on most small business websites, they are the reason a site can pass every check above and still underperform, and finding them by hand means checking every page on several screen sizes, which is why almost nobody does it.
But start with the seven. If your contact form is broken, nothing else on this page matters.
What to say to your designer
If something on this list is wrong, the useful approach is not an accusation. Most of these faults arrive after a build rather than during one, and some of them are things you changed yourself.
Send the specific thing, what you did, and what happened:
"I filled in the contact form on my phone yesterday at about 2pm and no email arrived. Can you check where those are going?"
That is a message anyone can act on in ten minutes. "I think there's something wrong with the website" is a message that costs you a week and a callout fee, because the first thing they have to do is work out what you meant.
Keep a note of what you reported and when. If the same thing breaks twice, that is information about your website. If it breaks three times, that is information about your designer.