The new business website checklist
Twelve things worth checking before and after you launch — most in under a minute, with no tools and nothing to buy. Free to read, free to print, no email required.
We screened 206 East Bay business websites this year. 22 had a fault the owner could have spotted in ten seconds — and almost none of them knew. This list is those faults, in the order they cost you money.
Before you launch
Get these wrong and nothing below matters.
Your page title is not the one your website builder shipped with
How: look at your browser tab, or search your business name and read the blue headline. Wrong if it says “Home”, “My Site”, “HOME | Mysite 1”, or just your web address. That line is the headline Google shows the world. This was the single most common fault we found — 8 of the 22 broken sites.
The site loads on a phone, on mobile data
How: turn wifi off on your phone and open your site. Why: most people meet your business this way first, and a site that only works on the office wifi is one you are the last to know is broken.
The padlock is there on every version of your address
How: try all four — with and without “www”, over http and https. All four should reach your site without a warning. Why: one site we screened worked on http and was dead on https.
Your phone number is tappable
How: tap it on your phone. Does it start a call? Why: if not, a customer has to memorise it, switch apps and type it. Most will not.
Your name, address, phone and hours match what Google shows
How: search your business name and compare the panel on the right against your own site, line by line. Why: when the two disagree, search engines trust you less — and so does whoever is outside your door at 5pm reading the wrong hours.
The week you launch
Nobody can hire you if nobody can find you.
Google can actually see the site
How: search site:yourdomain.com. Nothing at all after a couple of weeks means something is telling search engines to stay away. We found a site tagged to be ignored entirely — the owner wondered why the phone never rang.
Every page says what it is
How: read the short grey line under your result in Google. If it is a scrap of your menu or a stray sentence, no description is written and Google is guessing.
Your pictures have descriptions attached
How: ask whoever built the site whether the images have “alt text”. Why: it is how a blind visitor’s screen reader describes your work, and how image search finds it. On one site we screened, 64 of 66 pictures had none.
If a form asks for personal details, your privacy policy is reachable from that page
How: open the page with the form and look for the link without hunting. Why: a contact form collecting names, emails and phone numbers with no policy anywhere is the most common gap we see on otherwise tidy sites. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice — but it is worth asking someone who is.
Every few months
Sites rot quietly. Nobody emails to tell you.
The year in your footer is this year
How: scroll to the bottom. Why: we found footers frozen at 2016. To a visitor that reads as “nobody has touched this in a decade”, true or not.
Nothing has been injected into your pages
How: search site:yourdomain.com and read the results for words you never wrote. Why: two sites we screened were serving pharmacy and dating spam alongside their real content. Both owners were unaware.
Your email proves it is really from you
How: send a message from your business address to a Gmail account, open it there and choose Show original. You want PASS next to SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Why: when those are missing, your invoices and quotes quietly land in junk and nothing tells you. Ours had this fault, at a hostname nobody had noticed was wrong.
One caution about any check, including these. A failed check is not always a broken site. When we re-tested 13 sites that looked broken to an automated tool, 6 were working perfectly — the tool had been fooled. Look with your own eyes, in a real browser, before concluding anything is wrong.
Would you rather we just ran it?
Send us your web address and we will work through this list on your site and tell you what we find — including if the answer is that nothing needs doing. No charge and no obligation.
Send us your link or call or text (925) 603-3037