Check your own website, one step at a time
This is the same list we work through when we look at a website, written out plainly so you can go through every one of them on your own site, most of them on the phone in your hand.
How to use it
Go down the list in order and do each check as you read it. Every one of them tells you something a stranger or a search engine already knows about your business, and anything you find here is yours to fix, with us or without us.
If you would rather somebody went through it properly and told you what to fix first and in what order, that is the audit we do as a paid piece of work, and the advice that follows it is the part most owners actually want. Send a message and ask. Either way, this list stays here and stays free.
Every check
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Your title and description in search results
Search for your business name and find the result that is your website.
The line in bold should say what you are, and the short text under it should say what somebody can get from you. If it says Home, or Welcome, or stops halfway through a sentence, that is the first thing a stranger reads about you.
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Photo file names and alt text
Open one of your photos on its own, in a new tab, and look at the end of the address.
If the name is a camera code instead of words that describe the photo, search engines learn nothing from it. Then open the photo settings wherever your site is edited and look for a field called alt text or image description. If it is empty, the photo says nothing to a search engine or to anybody using a screen reader.
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The security certificate
Open your site and look at the address bar before anything else.
The address should start with https, and the browser should show no warning. If it says Not secure next to your address, every visitor sees that too, before they have read a word of your page.
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Your menu is text, not a photo
Open your menu or price list on your phone and press and hold on one price, the way you would to copy it.
If nothing highlights, it is a picture. A picture cannot be read by a search engine or quoted by an assistant. More on fixing that here.
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Your hours match everywhere
Put your website, your social page and your listing in search results side by side, and read the hours on all three.
If any day is different, customers are being told two different things, and an assistant will not know which one to repeat. Contradictions make you risky to recommend.
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The contact button actually works
On your phone, tap every button on your site that says message, book or contact, as if you were a customer.
Does it open the right thing, and does it reach you? Send yourself a test and see where it lands. A button that goes nowhere is a customer who gave up at the last step.
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Who owns your domain
Look up your address on any WHOIS service, then try to log in to the registrar it names.
The lookup tells you who holds the address and when it runs out. The login is the real test. If you cannot get in, you do not control your address, whatever anybody has told you. The full check is here.
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One clear job per page
Open each page of your site and say out loud what it wants the visitor to do.
Book a table, read the menu, find the door. If you cannot say it in one sentence, a visitor cannot work it out either, and neither can a search engine deciding what the page is for.
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How you show up in AI answers
Ask an AI assistant about your business by name. Then ask it the question a customer would ask about what you sell, without naming yourself.
See whether it knows you exist, whether what it says is true, and who it names instead of you. Why that happens, and what helps.
When you have been through the list
Start with the check that surprised you most, because that is usually the one a customer has already noticed, and come back to the rest when you have the time, since none of them needs a special tool or anybody's permission.
If you do ask us for the paid audit, you get the same honesty this list has, which means we will not tell you something is broken so we can sell you a new site, and sometimes the right answer is that yours is fine as it is.