Website Health Scorecard

Twelve questions, each one representing a fault we have found on a real site that was quietly costing its owner enquiries. None of them require a developer to check.

Why these twelve

They are not a technical audit. They are the twelve things that, in our experience, most often stand between a visitor and a phone call. A site can pass every technical benchmark and still fail all twelve, and it will not produce enquiries.

Speed, a tappable phone number, a page per service, honest pricing signals, working forms, real photographs, current information, and clear next steps. Nothing exotic, which is precisely why so many sites miss them.

How to read your score

• 10–12 — the site is not your constraint. If enquiries are low, the problem is upstream: traffic, targeting, offer or market.
• 7–9 — solid, with specific leaks. Fix the individual failures rather than rebuilding; a rebuild would probably reproduce them.
• 4–6 — the site is actively costing you enquiries. Advertising into it is expensive. Fix the failures before increasing spend.
• 0–3 — a rebuild is likely cheaper than patching, and any advertising budget spent before that is largely wasted.

The three failures that cost the most

A phone number that is not tappable on a phone. Most local service enquiries happen on a mobile, and a number rendered as an image or buried in a footer converts a fraction of what a tappable header number does. This is a fifteen-minute fix with a measurable effect.

One page listing every service. Search engines cannot rank a page for eight different things, and visitors cannot tell whether you specialise in theirs. Splitting one services page into eight is the most reliable SEO improvement available to a small site.

No pricing signal at all. You do not have to publish a price list. But a range, a starting figure or a minimum project size filters out the enquiries you would decline anyway and increases the quality of the ones you get. Sites with no pricing signal generate more enquiries and fewer customers.

What a rebuild does and does not fix

A new website fixes speed, structure, mobile behaviour and anything technical. It does not fix a weak offer, missing photography, absent reviews or an unclear description of what you sell — and those travel across from the old site untouched unless somebody deliberately addresses them.

If your score is low because of content rather than construction, spend the money on photography and writing before spending it on a rebuild. It is usually a tenth of the cost and a larger share of the improvement.

Figures and bands on this page are guidance drawn from Canadian local markets, not benchmarks or guarantees. Your own numbers should replace them as soon as you have three months of data.