And I don’t mean checking that it still loads.
I mean actually looking at it the way a potential customer would.
Reading the words. Clicking through the pages. Looking at what you’re asking people to do next.
Because when you run a small business, your own website can become surprisingly easy to ignore.
You built it. You know where everything is. You know what your business does. You know what you meant when you wrote that paragraph three years ago.
Your customer doesn’t.
And sometimes, simply looking at your website with fresh eyes can uncover things you’ve stopped noticing.
Your business may have changed. Has your website?
Small businesses rarely stay exactly the same.
Services change. Prices change. Your ideal customer becomes clearer. You get better at explaining what you do. Maybe you’ve stopped offering something entirely, or introduced something that has become a major part of the business.
But websites have a habit of staying frozen in time.
You update Instagram. You answer enquiries differently. You explain your services differently in conversation.
Meanwhile, your website is still introducing the version of your business from two years ago.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you need a new website.
Sometimes it just needs an update.
Can someone quickly understand what you actually do?
This is one of the simplest checks you can make.
Open your homepage and pretend you know absolutely nothing about your business.
Within a few seconds, can you tell:
what the business does
who it helps
why someone might choose it
what they should do next
If the answer is buried halfway down the page, hidden behind clever wording or dependent on someone already understanding your industry, there may be room to make things clearer.
Clear doesn’t have to mean boring.
It just means your customer shouldn’t have to solve a puzzle before they can work out whether you can help them.
Is the next step obvious?
Imagine someone has landed on your website and likes what they see.
What now?
Can they easily make an enquiry? Book? Buy? Learn more about a service? Find your contact details?
Or do they have to go looking?
A website can look beautiful and still make the customer journey unnecessarily difficult.
Your calls to action don’t need to scream BUY NOW from every section, either.
They simply need to make the next logical step easy.
Are you answering the questions customers actually have?
When you work inside your business every day, it’s easy to assume certain things are obvious.
They usually aren’t.
Think about the questions you regularly answer in emails, messages, enquiries or conversations.
How does it work?
What’s included?
Who is this for?
Where are you located?
What happens next?
Do I need to commit long-term?
If you answer the same question constantly, there’s a good chance your website could be doing some of that work for you.
And that’s really what a useful website should do.
Not just exist — work.
Look at it on your phone
This one is incredibly simple and incredibly easy to forget.
Open your website on your phone and actually use it.
Don’t just glance at the homepage.
Scroll. Open the menu. Click the buttons. Read the text. Fill in the contact form. Move between pages.
Something that looks perfectly fine while you’re editing it on a computer can feel completely different on a smaller screen.
You don’t need to understand web development to notice when something feels awkward.
You probably don’t need to rebuild the whole thing
This is important.
Finding a few things you’d change doesn’t automatically mean your website is terrible or needs to be replaced.
Maybe the messaging needs tightening.
Maybe the homepage needs to explain your offer sooner.
Maybe your calls to action could be clearer.
Maybe your services have changed and the copy simply hasn’t caught up yet.
Often, a handful of considered changes can make a website much easier for customers to understand and use.
So, when was the last time you actually looked at yours?
Not as the person who built it.
Not as the person who already knows the business inside out.
As a customer seeing it for the first time.
That little change in perspective can be surprisingly useful.
And if you’ve reached the point where you know your website could be working harder, but you’re too close to it to see what needs changing, that’s exactly why I introduced Website Reviews.
I look through your existing website from a marketing and customer-experience perspective and give you a clear, practical action plan — what’s already working, what may be getting in the way and what I’d prioritise next.
No automatic rebuild. No giant list of technical problems. And no assumption that you need to hand the work back to me afterwards.
Just an outside perspective so you can make the parts you already have work harder.
Website Reviews start from $350.
