How I Audit a Small Business Website in 15 Minutes

Google Lighthouse gave ARED Furniture Repair’s old site a 99 in performance. Fifteen minutes later I had a list of 7 broken links, a wrong zip code, and an exposed admin username. None of it showed up in the Lighthouse report. All of it was costing them customers.

Lighthouse measures speed and code quality. It does not measure whether the site actually works for the person trying to use it. That part takes a human, a little skepticism, and a checklist.

Below is the checklist I run before I get on a call with anyone. Same one I use on my own site when I haven’t looked at it in a while.

Why 15 Minutes Is Enough

Most audit tools spit out a 40-page PDF full of yellow warnings, most of which don’t matter. What actually matters for a small business site is a short list of things that block a customer from hiring you.

Broken navigation. Wrong contact info. Mobile that doesn’t work. A portfolio that doesn’t show your work. Those are the problems that lose leads, and you can find them in a quarter of an hour if you know where to look.

Minutes 1 to 3: Click Everything

Open the homepage. Click every link in the nav. Every CTA button. The logo. Every social icon in the header and footer. Scroll to the bottom and click the privacy policy link too. Keep a notes app open and write down anything that:

• Goes to a # or a dead page
• Opens a 404
• Redirects somewhere weird
• Opens a “coming soon” placeholder
• Takes you to the wrong page

On ARED’s old site, the Facebook icon in the header linked to #. The four service category cards on the homepage all linked to #. The main “See Our Work” CTA also linked to #. Seven broken links on a site whose owners were paying $200 a month for maintenance.

This is the highest-value step in the whole audit. A broken link on a contact page is the digital equivalent of a phone being disconnected.

Minutes 4 to 6: Verify the Business Info

Pull up the contact page. Open a second tab with the business’s Google Business Profile. Compare:

• Address. Same street, suite number, city?
• Zip code. Trips up a surprising number of sites.
• Phone number. Same area code and digits? Any typos?
• Hours. Do the website hours match what’s on Google?
• Email. Does it actually go somewhere? Send a test.

ARED’s contact page listed their zip as 75024. Their actual zip is 75098. That’s a 30-mile difference. A customer punching that zip into a map app to come pick up a piece of furniture would end up in the wrong city. Not a hypothetical. That was on the live site for who knows how long.

While you’re there, check if the phone number is wrapped in a tel: link so it’s tappable on mobile, whether the email is a mailto: link, and whether the contact form actually submits. Thirty-second checks that save real customers from real friction.

Minutes 7 to 9: The Mobile Test

Pull out your phone. Open the site on it. Not the mobile preview in Chrome DevTools, an actual phone.

Try to do the three things a customer would want to do:

1. Read the homepage without zooming.
2. Tap the phone number and have it offer to call.
3. Get from the homepage to the contact form in two taps or fewer.

If any of that is frustrating on your phone, it’s frustrating on everyone’s. Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, so if mobile is broken, your rankings are broken too.

Specific things to watch for:

• Horizontal scrolling where there shouldn’t be any
• Buttons that are too small to tap cleanly
• Popups that cover the whole screen with no visible close button
• Forms where the keyboard covers the field you’re typing in
• Nav menus that won’t open, or won’t close once they’re open

Minutes 10 to 12: The Money Page

Every business site has one page that matters more than the rest. For a restaurant it’s the menu. For a plumber, the services page. For a furniture repair shop, the portfolio. Find that page and look at it like you’re seeing the business for the first time.

Ask:

• Is there real work here, or stock photos?
• Does the copy describe the actual business, or is it keyword stuffing?
• Can a visitor see what they do in five seconds?
• Is there an obvious next step after they look at it?
• Does it answer the question the visitor came here to answer?

ARED’s old portfolio page opened with two dense paragraphs of SEO word-salad before a single photo. The photos themselves were static thumbnails. No way to enlarge them, no before-and-after comparison. For a furniture repair business, the portfolio is the whole pitch. If the photos don’t sell the work, nothing else on the site is going to.

This is usually where I find the biggest opportunities. Fixing the money page is often worth more than fixing everything else combined.

Minutes 13 to 14: Run Lighthouse Anyway

Open Chrome DevTools, go to the Lighthouse tab, run a full audit. If you don’t want to mess with DevTools, you can run the same test from my performance page and get the scores without installing anything. Either way, look at all four scores, not just performance:

• Performance. Aim for 95+. Under 90 is a problem.
• Accessibility. Aim for 100. Under 95 usually means a color contrast issue or a missing label.
• Best Practices. Aim for 100. Common misses: missing HTTPS, console errors, outdated libraries.
• SEO. Aim for 100. Common misses: no meta description, no viewport tag, images without alt text.

A low accessibility score usually means the site was dropped onto a template and nobody looked at it again. A low SEO score means nobody configured the basics. Neither needs a full rebuild to fix, but both tell you something about how the site was put together.

ARED’s old site scored 99 on performance and 91 on accessibility. The performance number is what the agency would have put in a report. The accessibility number is what told the real story.

Minute 15: Peek Under the Hood

Right-click, View Page Source. You’re not trying to read every line, just scan for red flags:

• Generic meta tags. If the title is “Home” and the description is missing, nobody’s doing basic SEO.
• No structured data. Search for application/ld+json. If there’s nothing there, search engines have to guess what the business does.
• Exposed WordPress REST API. Add /wp-json/wp/v2/users to the URL. If it returns usernames, the site is leaking admin info.
• Inline tracking scripts from ten different services. Every extra analytics pixel slows the site down.

Most business owners aren’t going to fix this stuff themselves. It still matters, because it tells you how much care went into the build. Clean meta tags, real schema, no exposed admin endpoints? Someone who knew what they were doing built it. None of that? It was a template filler.

What to Do With the List

After 15 minutes, you have a list. Prioritize it like this:

1. Broken links and wrong info. These actively prevent customers from contacting you. Fix first.
2. Mobile failures. More than 60% of traffic is mobile. If mobile is broken, most of your traffic is having a bad time.
3. The money page. Whatever page closes the deal. Make it actually close deals.
4. Lighthouse scores. Nice to have. Fix after the above.
5. Under-the-hood issues. Usually a sign the site needs a rebuild, not a patch.

If your list is short and the issues are small, fix them yourself or hand the list to your current agency. If the list is long and the issues are structural, you’re probably better off rebuilding. I wrote about the signs that it’s time for a redesign here.

Why I Do This for Free

I’ll audit any small business website for free. No pitch, no pressure, no PDF stuffed with 40 yellow warnings. I’ll spend 15 minutes on your site, write up what I find, and send it to you. If the list is short, you’ll know the site is in good shape. If it’s long, at least you’ll know what you’re dealing with.

Most small businesses have no idea whether their site is good or not. They built it once, they pay someone a monthly fee, and they assume it’s fine. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t. Either way, 15 minutes from someone who knows what to look for is worth more than another invoice from whoever built it.

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I build and audit websites for small businesses across the Denver Front Range: Denver, Lakewood, Boulder, Arvada, Golden, Littleton, Aurora, Westminster, and Highlands Ranch.