Most Derby business owners have never sat down and checked their own website from start to finish. The site goes live, a few pages get updated when something changes, and the rest is left alone for years. Meanwhile, a potential customer on a phone in Ilkeston or Nottingham may give it only a few seconds before deciding whether to stay. A website audit Derby owners can run themselves is a fast way to find out what is costing you enquiries. You do not need a developer or a paid tool to spot most of the problems, only half an hour and a willingness to be honest.
| Key Insight | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Test on a real phone, not just a laptop | Load the site on mobile data rather than office Wi-Fi. Slow connections expose problems that desktop testing hides. |
| Time your homepage on your phone | A widely used small business checklist treats anything over three seconds as a warning sign. Past that point, impatient visitors start to leave. |
| Your phone number should take under ten seconds to find | If a visitor has to hunt for contact details, you are losing enquiries. Put a clickable number in the header and footer. |
| Search for your own services in Derby | Type the phrases a local customer would use, such as “electrician Derby”. If you do not appear, visibility is the priority, not cosmetic changes. |
| Check the dates on your content | Anything untouched for over a year needs review, especially prices, opening hours, project examples and service areas. |
| Confirm your privacy and legal pages exist and name your business | Missing, outdated or wrongly named legal pages are a basic trust problem for UK visitors who share their details with you. |
| Fix the top three failures first | Pick the three checks that cost you the most enquiries and deal with those before touching the rest of the list. |
This DIY website checklist is built for owners who want a straight answer about their own site without hiring anyone first. It takes about half an hour if you keep moving, and it needs no technical skills. Most of the checks are things a customer would notice within a minute of landing on your page.
Before you begin, gather four things: a smartphone, a laptop, a login for your analytics if you have one, and a list of the three services that bring in the most work. Open your site in a private browser window so saved logins and cached pages do not flatter the result. Keep a notepad or spreadsheet with each check written as a yes or no line.
In practice, most owners run the audit in the wrong order. They start with the homepage design, which is the hardest thing to judge objectively, and run out of time before reaching the contact details. Start with what a customer does first: arrive, understand what you do, find a number and send a message. Everything else can wait.
Pro tip: Ask someone who has never seen the site to find your phone number while you time them. Their result will be more honest than anything you judge yourself.
Speed is the check owners most often skip because it feels technical. It is not. Load your homepage on your phone using mobile data, then count how long it takes before you can read the headline and tap a button. A widely used small business checklist treats anything over three seconds as a warning sign, and that is roughly where impatient visitors start drifting away.
If the page feels slow, check whether the main image is a large photo straight from a camera. In my experience, trades websites are the worst offenders, because job photos get uploaded at full resolution and never resized. Compressing those images is one of the cheapest fixes available, and it often moves the needle more than a redesign would.
Next, look at the phone layout as if you were standing on a ladder with a leaking gutter and one thumb free. Can you read the headline without zooming? Does the menu open properly? Are the buttons spaced far enough apart that you do not tap the wrong one? A site that looks tidy on a laptop but forces sideways scrolling fails this test immediately.
Pay attention to forms as well. An enquiry form that asks for six fields on a small screen will push many visitors to give up or phone instead, and a phone call is not always the enquiry you wanted.
Pro tip: Rotate your phone to landscape and back, then check whether the header still shows the phone number. Layouts often break in one orientation, and nobody notices until a customer mentions it.
A visitor should be able to contact you within seconds of arriving. Time this one too. Note where your phone number, email and address appear, and whether the number is clickable on a phone. A number printed as plain text forces the visitor to copy it into their dialler, and a fair share will not bother.
Next, check whether every page has a clear next step. A service page should end with one obvious action, such as calling now, requesting a quote or booking a survey. If a page ends with a paragraph and nothing else, the visitor has no reason to move. The published checklist I used as a reference asks the same question in plain terms, and if the honest answer is no, that is a fix worth making this week.
For a business in Derby or Ilkeston, the service area should be stated plainly, for example Derby, Derbyshire and the wider East Midlands. Vague wording such as “serving the whole UK” tells a local customer very little. Check that your address, opening hours and areas covered match what your Google Business Profile says, because mismatches confuse both visitors and search engines.
Read your homepage out loud. Count how many sentences begin with “we”, “our” or “I”, then compare that with sentences that answer what the customer needs. Most small business sites lean heavily on the first group. The customer wants to know whether you can fix their boiler, design their shop or survey their roof, and how quickly you can do it.
Copy that talks about your history before it answers that question loses people early. Move the customer’s problem to the top of the page and let your story sit lower down, where it supports the decision rather than delaying it.
A website that talks about the business instead of the customer is usually answering questions nobody asked.
Check every page for information that has gone out of date. The usual culprits are prices, opening hours, team photos, project examples and any line that mentions a specific year. A practical rule is that anything not reviewed in more than a year needs a second look. The published checklist flags content untouched for over a year as a warning sign, and I agree with that, although evergreen service descriptions can stay put if the details around them are current.
Look at your news or blog section too. A last post from several years ago tells a visitor the business may have quietly stopped operating, even if that is not the case.
Open a private search window and type the phrases a customer in Derby would use. Try “plumber Derby”, “loft conversion Nottingham” or whatever matches your trade, and note where you appear. If you are not on the first page or two of results, the rest of the audit still matters, but visibility is the real problem and needs a dedicated plan.
Searching only for your business name tells you whether people already know you. It does not tell you whether new customers can find you, which is the question that drives growth.
Check that each main page has a unique title and a meta description. The title should name the service and the place, for example “Roof Surveys in Derby | Your Company Name”. Duplicate titles across pages, or a title that just says “Home”, waste the chance to appear for a specific search. You can see these in the browser tab or by viewing the page source.
Pro tip: If you have not set up Google Search Console for your site, do it now. It shows which searches bring people to your pages and flags indexing problems that a manual check cannot see.
| Approach | What it catches | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Manual 30-minute checklist | Layout, clarity, contact details, obvious copy and date problems | Owners who want a quick, honest read at no cost |
| Free Google tools (Search Console and PageSpeed Insights) | Indexing issues, speed scores and some mobile usability errors | Owners ready to check technical detail once the basics are sorted |
| Paid site crawler audits | Broken links, duplicate titles and problems across large numbers of pages | Larger sites with many pages, or the period after a redesign |
Confirm that a privacy policy exists, is linked from the footer and names your business correctly. If your site collects enquiries through a form, stores analytics data or places cookies, the policy should say so. A policy that still names a previous trading name or a closed address is worse than having none, because it signals neglect.
The same published checklist lists out-of-date privacy and terms pages as a warning sign, and it is one of the checks owners most often ignore. It takes five minutes to read the page and confirm it still matches how you operate.
If you trade as a limited company, UK rules generally require certain registration details to be shown on your website, so check the footer carries them. Also check that any accreditations or insurance details displayed are still valid. Testimonials should be real, dated where possible and easy to verify. Old or unverifiable praise does more harm than having none at all.
Count the checks you failed. Zero to three failed checks suggests a solid base where the job is keeping content fresh. Four to six means the site is probably costing you enquiries, and a handful of targeted fixes should make a visible difference. Seven or more signals that the site needs proper attention, and a rebuild may be a better investment than patching it.
Do not try to fix every failure at once. Pick the three that most directly block enquiries, which are usually slow load, missing contact details or pages with no next step. Fix those, retest on your phone and only then move on to copy and SEO. Working in that order usually pays back faster than a long list that gets abandoned by Friday.
If you want a second opinion once your list is written, a consultant can review the findings in an hour and tell you which items matter most for your trade. Andy Morley offers website and SEO reviews for businesses across Derby and the East Midlands, and a focused review is often far cheaper than a full rebuild.
Roughly 30 minutes if you work through the checks in order without stopping to fix things. Fixing what you find takes longer, so note each issue and deal with them afterwards.
No. Most of the checks need only a phone, a laptop and a browser. Free Google tools add useful detail on speed and indexing, but they are not needed for the basics.
Twice a year is a sensible minimum, plus a check after any redesign, price change or new service launch.
It will find obvious problems that hold rankings and enquiries back, such as unclear titles, slow pages and stale content. It is not a full SEO strategy, and winning visibility in local searches usually needs a planned programme of work.
Get help if your score is seven or more, if speed fixes do not change anything, or if you cannot tell whether a problem is technical. An hour with a specialist is often enough to set priorities.
In most cases yes, because a contact form collects personal data. Check that the policy names your business and explains what happens to the enquiries you receive.
Which of these checks caught you out on your own site, and what did you change first? I would like to hear your experience, so share it in the comments or get in touch.
