The 6 Things We Check Before We Touch Your Website

Most website "audits" are a Lighthouse score and a shrug. Ours isn't - we run six categories against every site before we say a word about what's wrong with it, because a number with no explanation doesn't help anyone decide anything.

Here's exactly what we look at, and why each one earns its place.

1. Performance & Speed

Not just a Lighthouse score in isolation - the number that actually matters is Largest Contentful Paint on mobile, because that's the moment a real visitor on a real phone either sees your site load or gives up and leaves. We've measured sites taking over 20 seconds to paint on mobile. Most of that traffic is gone before anything renders.

2. Security & Trust

Six specific things: HSTS, a Content-Security-Policy, nosniff, frame protection, a referrer policy, and whether privacy/terms pages actually exist. That last one isn't a technicality - a UK business with no privacy policy linked anywhere is a real compliance gap, not just a missing page.

3. SEO & Discoverability

Title length, description length, whether structured data is present, and whether a shared link actually looks like something worth clicking (an Open Graph image) or just a bare grey URL. Structured data specifically matters more than most people realise - it's the difference between a plain blue link in Google and one with your actual star rating showing underneath it.

4. Conversion Readiness

A fast, secure, well-optimised site that gives a visitor no clear next step has still failed at its actual job. We check for real calls to action, real contact paths (not just an email address buried in a footer), and whether trust signals - reviews, accreditations - are actually visible rather than just true somewhere on the page.

5. Accessibility

Contrast, labelling, semantic structure. This one's often treated as a checkbox, but it's a real chunk of your visitors and a real legal exposure if it's ignored entirely.

6. Design & Attractiveness

Last, not first - because a beautiful site that's slow, insecure, and has nothing telling visitors what to do next hasn't actually done its job. But once the rest is right, this is what turns a visit into trust.

Why this matters if you're evaluating a website (yours or a quote for a new one): ask whichever company you're talking to which of these six they actually measured before quoting you a fix. If the answer is "it just looks better now," you're paying for one of six things and hoping the other five were fine already.