You don't need tools or a developer to get a decent read on your site's health. Set a timer for twenty minutes and work through this list.
1. Does it load fast on your phone, on mobile data?
Turn off wi‑fi and open your homepage. If it takes more than three or four seconds to become usable, that's costing you visitors. Note which page feels slowest — that's where to start later.
2. Is everything on HTTPS?
Look for the padlock in the address bar on a few different pages. Click into it. If any page says "Not secure" or "mixed content," that's a fix worth making this week — browsers increasingly warn visitors away from it.
3. Do the contact routes actually work?
Send yourself a message through every form on the site. Call the phone number. Email the address in the footer. It is genuinely common to find a form that has been silently failing for months.
4. Check it on a screen you don't normally use
If you built it on a laptop, look at it on a phone. If you live on your phone, open it on a desktop. Look for text running off the edge, buttons too small to tap, images that overflow.
5. Click your top nav links
Every one. You're looking for anything that 404s, redirects somewhere odd, or lands on a page that's clearly out of date.
6. Search Google for your business name
Does your own site come up first? Is the description under it the one you'd choose? If a competitor or an old directory listing outranks your homepage, that's worth investigating.
7. Look at the copyright year in the footer
It sounds trivial. A footer that says 2023 tells every visitor the site isn't being looked after, and they extend that assumption to your business.
8. Run one page through PageSpeed Insights
Use pagespeed.web.dev on your homepage. You're not trying to hit 100 — you're checking whether the "Core Web Vitals Assessment" line says Passed or Failed.
9. Confirm you have a backup — and know where it is
Ask yourself: if the site broke right now, how would we get it back, and how old would the copy be? If you can't answer that in one sentence, it's the most important thing on this list.
What to do with the results
Most sites pass most of this. If yours turned up two or three issues, they're usually quick fixes. If it turned up seven, the site needs a proper going‑over — that's what our maintenance work is for.