The 20-minute homepage audit you can run today

I get asked to "look at the website" more than anything else, and almost every time the owner already knows something is wrong. What they do not have is an order to look in. So they rewrite the headline, change the button colour, and the page still does not work, because the problem was three scrolls further down.

Here is the audit I run. It takes twenty minutes, it needs no tools, and you can do it on your own site this afternoon. Set a timer — the limit is the point. A homepage you stare at for two hours stops being a page and becomes your own memory of building it.

If you would rather have the three passes as a one-page checklist to tick off, I can send it to you:

Pass one: the stranger test (5 minutes)

Open your homepage on the device you use least. Look at it for five seconds, then look away and answer three questions out loud:

1. What is sold here? Not the category — the thing. "Design" is a category. "Logos and brand kits for new businesses" is a thing.
2. Who is it for? If the answer is "anyone", the page is for nobody. A stranger deciding in five seconds needs to see themselves.
3. What am I meant to do next? There should be one obvious answer, and it should be findable without scrolling.

Three answers in five seconds is a pass. Most pages I open fail on the second question: the copy describes what the business does rather than who it is for, and the reader has to do the matching work themselves. Most of them do not bother.

The fix is usually the words, not the design. Confucius stated the principle about two and a half thousand years before anyone had a homepage:

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

— Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE)Analects, Book XIII (c. 5th century BCE) · trans. James Legge, 1861

"Bespoke pet access solutions" is an incorrect name. So is "creative partner", and so is any heading a customer would have to translate before recognising themselves in it. Calling the thing what it is costs nothing and is the single highest-yield edit on most pages.

The same test applies to whole sections. If a block does not help a stranger answer one of the three questions, it is costing you the attention you needed for the block underneath it.

Pass two: the proof pass (10 minutes)

Now scroll slowly to the bottom. You are looking for one thing: can a stranger believe you?

Go through this list and mark each one present or absent. Do not fix anything yet — finish the pass first, or you will spend the whole twenty minutes on item one.

• A real name and a real face. A business with no human on it reads as a business that might not answer the phone. One photo and one first name is enough.
• Something you have actually made. Three examples beats a paragraph claiming ten years. If you have done one job, show one job.
• A price, or the shape of one. You do not have to publish a number. You do have to answer "is this for someone like me" — a range, a starting price, or a sentence about how you quote. A page with no price signal at all makes the reader assume expensive and leave.
• A way to contact you that is not a form. An email address. A phone number. Something that proves there is a person at the other end.
• Words a customer would use. Read your headings aloud. If you would not say the sentence to someone in a café, it is industry language and it is quietly filtering out the people you want.

Every absent item is a reason someone left without telling you. Count them. Three or more absent and the page is not a homepage yet — it is a brochure.

The one that surprises people is the price signal. Owners leave it off to avoid scaring anyone away, and it does the opposite: it scares away everyone who needed to know they could afford you, and keeps the people who were going to ask for a discount anyway.

Pass three: the phone pass (5 minutes)

Open the same page on your phone. Most of the people you are worried about will never see it any other way.

• Read the first screen without pinching. If you zoom, the type is too small or the headline is too long.
• Tap the main button with your thumb, one-handed. If you have to aim, it is too small or too close to something else.
• Watch it load on mobile data, not your own wifi. Turn wifi off and reload. A page that takes six seconds on a train has already lost the argument.
• Check the header does not eat the screen. A large logo and a menu can take half a phone screen before a single word of yours appears.

That is the audit. Twenty minutes, three passes, and a list of things that failed.

What to fix first

Fix in this order, and do one at a time:

1. Anything from pass one. A stranger who cannot tell what you sell will never reach the thing you fixed in pass two.
2. The missing price signal, if it was missing. It is usually one sentence and it changes who contacts you more than any other single edit.
3. The phone problems. They affect the most people and are the least interesting to fix, which is why they survive for years.
4. Everything else.

Resist the urge to redesign. Almost every page I have audited needed four or five sentences changed and one section deleted. A redesign is a way of doing something that feels big instead of the small thing that works, and it costs a month.

If you run this and come out with a list you are not sure how to read — which failures matter for a business like yours, and which you can leave for next year — that is roughly what the quiz sorts out.