The one-hour website audit: 15 checks any owner can run.

You're about to budget for ads, SEO, maybe a new sign on the truck. Every one of those dollars points at your website — and if the website quietly fails, the marketing fails with it, invisibly.

Here's the uncomfortable part: most owners haven't actually used their own site in months. They look at it, sure. But they haven't filled out the contact form, tapped the phone number on an actual phone, or checked whether the hours still say what the door says.

This audit takes about an hour, requires no tools beyond your phone and a friend's, and is ordered by how much a failure costs. Start at the top. Fix as you go.

The money checks (do these first)

These are the failures that cost you a lead the moment they happen. Test them on your phone, not your office desktop — Statcounter's global data has consistently shown that more than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and for local searches ("plumber near me") it skews even higher.

1. Submit your own contact form. Fill it out like a customer would and hit send. Pass: the inquiry lands in an inbox someone actually checks, within five minutes. Fail: it goes to an old employee's email, a spam folder, or nowhere. This is the single most expensive silent failure we see — forms can break during a hosting change or plugin update and nobody notices for months.

2. Tap the phone number on a phone. Pass: your phone offers to dial it. Fail: it's plain text you'd have to memorize and type. On mobile, a number that isn't a tel: link is a number that doesn't get called.

3. Call that number. Is it still your number? Does it ring the right line during business hours? Pass: a human or a decent voicemail. Fail: disconnected, or it rings a desk nobody sits at anymore.

4. Check every price on the site. Service prices, "starting at" figures, delivery fees. Pass: they match what you'd actually quote today. Fail: they're from 2023. A stale low price starts every sales conversation with an argument; a stale high price ends conversations before they start.

5. Check hours and address everywhere they appear. Site footer, contact page, and — separately — your Google Business Profile. Pass: all three match, including holiday hours. Fail: any mismatch. A customer who drives to a closed shop doesn't come back.

The "does it even load" checks

6. Open your site on your phone over cellular — not office Wi-Fi. Count seconds until you can read and tap things. Pass: usable in about 3 seconds. Fail: you're still watching a spinner at 5+. Google's own research (the 2017 mobile speed study by Google/SOASTA) found the probability of a visitor bouncing jumps 32% as load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds — and it gets worse from there.

7. Try to complete one real task on mobile. Find a price, request a quote, read your service area. Pass: thumb-only, no pinch-zooming, no buttons too small to hit. Fail: you had to zoom or rotate the phone.

8. Check the padlock. Does the address bar show https:// with no "Not Secure" warning? Pass: padlock, no warnings. Fail: browsers are actively telling your customers not to trust you.

9. Click every link in your main menu and footer. Pass: every one goes somewhere sensible. Fail: any 404, any "coming soon" page from two redesigns ago, any link to a social account you abandoned.

10. Search your business name on Google. Does your site come up first, with sensible-looking title and description? Pass: yes, and the snippet doesn't say "Home | index" or show a hacked-looking pharmacy spam title. Fail: anything weird here means a deeper problem — flag it for whoever manages the site.

The trust checks

11. Read your homepage like a stranger with a problem. Within five seconds, can they tell what you do, where you do it, and what to tap next? Pass: yes to all three. Fail: the first screen is a slideshow of stock photos and a slogan.

12. Find the newest date on your site. Blog post, copyright year, "news" section. Pass: something from the last few months, and the copyright year in the footer is this year. Fail: the latest post is from 2022. A visibly abandoned site reads like a visibly abandoned business. (If you're not going to post, remove the blog — an empty section is worse than none.)

13. Check for departed people and dead services. Team pages showing someone who left, services you no longer offer. Pass: everything on the site is something you'd stand behind on a phone call today. Fail: anything you'd have to awkwardly walk back.

14. Look at your photos honestly. Pass: real photos of your work, your shop, your trucks — even phone photos. Fail: the same stock handshake photo your competitor uses. A typical Keller plumber with ten real job-site photos will out-convert a slicker site running on stock imagery, because local customers are buying you, not a template.

15. Have someone else run checks 1–7. A spouse, a friend, your newest employee — someone who doesn't know where everything is. Watch them, don't help. Pass: they get to "contact you" without asking questions. Fail: anywhere they hesitate is where real customers leave.

How West Fork approaches this

Every project we take on — new build or rescue — starts with exactly this kind of audit, plus the parts that need tooling: form delivery monitoring, uptime checks, Core Web Vitals, and analytics that show where people actually drop off. Our care plans re-run the critical checks monthly, because forms and integrations break silently. If you run this checklist and something fails that you can't fix, that's a fifteen-minute conversation, not a sales pitch.