How to check your website is actually working

Most business owners never look at their own website the way a customer does. You built it once, approved it, and moved on to running the business. If enquiries have gone quiet and you suspect something is wrong, a proper website review will usually tell you why within twenty minutes, with no technical skill needed.

The twenty minute website check

This checklist covers your website's health from every angle a customer actually experiences: whether Google can find you, whether the site works on a phone, and whether anyone can get through to you. Work through it in order. Each step takes a few minutes and needs nothing more than a browser and your phone.

1. Search Google for your own business name and see what comes back.
2. Search for what you do plus your town, in a private browser window.
3. Open your website on your phone and try to use it one-handed.
4. Fill in your own contact form and see whether the message arrives.
5. Call the number on your website from a different phone.
6. Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights.
7. Check whether your site has ever been added to Google Search Console.

If any of those throws up a surprise, the sections below explain what it means and what to do about it.

Check Google can actually find your website

Start with the basics. Type site:yourwebsite.co.uk into Google, swapping in your own domain. If pages come back, Google has found and stored your site. If nothing comes back, or only one or two pages appear when you know you have more, Google has either missed the rest of your site or is choosing not to show them.

Next, search for your Google Business Profile by typing your business name into Google. Check what comes back: the correct address or service area, the correct phone number, opening hours that match reality, and a website link that points to your current site rather than an old one.

Then run the search a genuine customer would run. Open a private or incognito browser window, so your own history and location do not skew the result, and search for what you do plus your town, for example "plumber in Reading" or "wedding florist Leeds". Look honestly at what comes up. If you are not there and a handful of competitors are, that tells you something on its own, and our guide on why a business goes missing from Google covers the most common reasons.

Check your website works on a phone

Most people who find a small business online do it from a phone, often standing somewhere, in a hurry, on an ordinary mobile signal. Open your own site on your phone now and use it the way a customer would.

Can you read the text without pinching to zoom? Does the menu open and close properly? Is the phone number a tappable link, or does someone have to copy it out by hand? Does a form fit the screen, or does it force sideways scrolling? Time how long the homepage takes to appear. Past five seconds, most visitors have already given up before it finishes loading.

A site that looks fine on a laptop but is awkward on a phone loses the exact customers it was built to win. Our guide on what a website needs to win local customers covers the specific things a good local site gets right beyond loading quickly.

Check someone can actually contact you

This is the part owners skip most often, because the contact page feels like the one bit of the site that could not possibly be broken. Test it anyway.

Fill in your own enquiry form with a real email address and send it. Then wait. Check your inbox, your spam folder, and if you can, ask whoever normally handles enquiries whether anything landed with them. Contact forms fail quietly all the time: a hosting change breaks the email delivery, an old address is still wired into the form, or an update stops something working and nobody notices because nobody was submitting the form to find out.

Call the phone number listed on your website, ideally from a different phone so you hear it as a customer would. Confirm it rings through to someone, rather than an old line, a disconnected number, or a mobile that changed hands two office moves ago. If your address is listed anywhere, check it is still where you actually work.

A website that looks finished but quietly swallows enquiries is worse than no website at all, because it leaves potential customers thinking you ignored them.

Free website checker tools worth using

Beyond the manual checks above, a handful of free tools will show you things you cannot easily see by eye.

Google's own PageSpeed Insights tests your homepage, or any other page you give it, and reports back on load speed and a handful of technical issues in plain enough language to follow without a technical background. Run your homepage through it, and your busiest inside page too.

Google Search Console is worth setting up if you have not already, since it is free and shows you which pages Google has found, any pages it is struggling to read, and any errors it has hit trying to crawl your site. It takes a short verification step to connect to your website, but once it is running it flags problems long before a customer notices them.

For a fuller picture in one place, our own free check looks at how your business currently shows up across Google and the AI tools people are starting to search with, and hands back a plain-English summary of what is working and what needs fixing, at no cost. You can run the free visibility check on your website directly.

What to do with what you find

Most owners who work through this list find one or two clear problems rather than everything being wrong at once. A form that fails silently. A phone number nobody updated. A site Google has barely found because it launched quietly and nobody told anyone it existed.

Fix the contact problems first, since a broken form or a dead number costs you a customer the moment it happens. Then look at speed and mobile layout, because those affect every single visitor whether they notice consciously or not. Google visibility issues usually take longer to sort out and are worth tackling once the basics are solid.

If your site is slow because of where it is hosted rather than how it was built, our guide to what web hosting costs in the UK explains what you are likely paying for and what a decent upgrade looks like.

Twenty minutes of honest testing tells you more about your website than months of wondering why the phone has gone quiet. We built our own check so any business owner can see this picture without digging through it alone. Run the free visibility check on your website and you will know exactly what to fix first.