Free Website Review: 15 Checks to Run on Your Site Today
Most website owners I meet in Derbyshire know something is wrong with their site. They just do not know what. The site looks fine on their own laptop, the logo is in the right place, and yet enquiries have gone quiet.
That is exactly the gap a free website review is meant to close. In the eighteen years I have spent in marketing, I have sat through hundreds of these conversations, and the pattern is always the same. The issues are not hidden. They are just not being looked for.
This post gives you a 15-point checklist you can run on your own site today, no developer or agency required. Work through each section in order and you will come away with a clear, honest picture of where your website is helping you and where it is quietly costing you business.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
If you would rather have this done for you, our free website review tool runs a version of this exact checklist against your site in minutes.
Run my free website reviewWhat a free website review should cover first: speed and access
Before you look at a single word of copy, check whether people can actually get into your site and stay there. This is where most Derbyshire SMB sites lose visitors before they have read a thing.
1. Page load speed
Load your homepage on your phone using mobile data, not your office WiFi. If it takes more than three seconds, you are losing visitors before the page has even rendered. Google's own research has shown bounce rates rise sharply past that point, and it only gets worse on a weak signal in a rural part of the East Midlands.
2. Mobile usability
Open the site on your own phone and try to use it one-handed. Can you read the text without zooming. Can you tap a button without hitting the one next to it. More than half of search traffic for most of our Derbyshire clients now arrives on mobile, so this is not a nice-to-have.
3. Broken links and dead pages
Click through your main navigation, your footer links, and any buttons on the homepage. A broken link does not just frustrate a visitor, it tells Google your site is not maintained, which quietly damages your search rankings over time.
4. SSL and basic security
Check the address bar for a padlock icon and confirm the URL starts with https. If it does not, browsers will flag your site as not secure, and that single warning is enough to send a nervous visitor straight back to Google.
Fix this one first
If your site fails on speed, start with images. Oversized photos are the single biggest cause of slow load times we find when we run a free website review for a new client.
Running your own free website review: what visitors actually see
Once you know people can get in and the site loads fast enough, look at what they land on. This is the section most business owners skip, because they are too close to their own copy to see it fresh.
5. Clear calls to action
On every key page, ask yourself what you want the visitor to do next. Call. Book. Buy. Enquire. If there is no obvious button or link telling them that, you are relying on luck.
6. Contact information visibility
Can a visitor find your phone number or enquiry form within five seconds, on any page, on any device. We worked with Etta Plumbing in Osmaston, Derby, where a buried contact page was part of why enquiries were not converting. Once that was fixed alongside wider SEO work, they moved onto page one for searches like "plumbers Derby" and "plumbers near me".
7. Trust signals
Reviews, case studies, accreditations, years in business. Visitors who have never heard of you are deciding in seconds whether you are credible. A site with no proof of past work is asking people to take a leap of faith they are not willing to make.
8. Navigation clarity
Count how many clicks it takes a stranger to find your pricing, your services, and your location. If it is more than two or three, your menu structure is working against you, not for you.
A website does not need to be clever. It needs to be clear enough that a stranger can find what they came for and trust you enough to get in touch. — Stuart Baddiley
200+ leads a month, because the site actually converted
Casa Dental in Derby city centre now generates over 200 leads a month from Google Ads. That spend only pays off because the landing experience was built to convert, not just to look presentable. Paid traffic to a weak website is money spent twice.
See how we fix converting pagesThe SEO checks every free website review needs
You can have the most beautiful website in Derbyshire and still be invisible if the basics behind the scenes are not in place. This is the part of a free website review that most business owners have never actually seen.
9. Meta titles and descriptions
View the page source or use a free browser plugin to check every important page has a unique title and description. Generic or duplicated titles across pages confuse search engines and waste the one chance you get to stand out in results.
10. Heading structure
Every page should have one clear H1 and a sensible run of H2 and H3 headings underneath it, not a wall of bold paragraph text pretending to be headings. Search engines read heading structure to understand what a page is actually about.
11. Image alt text
Hover over your product or service images and check whether they have descriptive alt text. Missing alt text is a lost opportunity for image search traffic, and it also matters for visitors using screen readers.
12. Outdated content
Scan your blog and key pages for anything referencing old prices, past years, or services you no longer offer. We see this constantly with legal sector clients, where a single outdated page undoes months of other SEO work. One client saw roughly a tenfold increase in web traffic once content accuracy and structure were addressed together.
Free website review checks for local and offline consistency
For most Derbyshire and East Midlands SMBs, the final checks are about how your website connects to the real world, not just the internet.
13. Google Business Profile and NAP consistency
Your Name, Address, and Phone number should match exactly across your website, your Google Business Profile, and any directories you appear in. Even small mismatches, like "St" versus "Street", confuse local search ranking signals.
14. Form friction
Fill in your own enquiry or contact form as a test. Count the fields. If you are asking for more than name, email, phone, and a message for a simple enquiry, you are giving people a reason to abandon it halfway through.
15. Local relevance signals
Check whether your homepage and key service pages actually mention the areas you serve. We worked with Croots Farm Shop in Duffield, where tying content and social activity back to a clear local identity helped drive 3 million social media impressions in a single year, built on a site that reinforced the same local message consistently.
How a working website fits into the BIG12 framework
Website sits inside the Get Found cluster of our BIG12 framework, alongside SEO, Google and GBP, and local marketing. The logic is simple. None of your other marketing can work if the destination it sends people to does not convert.
I built BIG12 after eighteen years of watching Derbyshire and East Midlands businesses invest in ads, social, and SEO, only to send that traffic to a site that quietly lost it. Fixing the website checklist above is step one. Fitting it into the wider BIG12 system is what makes the other eleven pillars actually pay off.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
Our free BIG12 Scorecard benchmarks your website alongside the other eleven pillars in a few minutes.
Get my BIG12 ScorecardThe challenge is never learning. It is doing.
By now you have a genuine 15-point list and, if you have worked through it honestly, a fairly clear sense of where your site is letting you down. That is the easy part. Knowing your meta titles are missing or your mobile menu is clunky does not fix either of those things on its own.
This is the gap I see most often with Derbyshire SMB owners. They know exactly what is wrong. They just do not have the time, the technical confidence, or the spare hour between running the business to actually make the changes stick. That is where we come in, not as another voice telling you what you already suspect, but as the team that actually implements it alongside you.
If you would rather hand this list to someone who has fixed the same fifteen issues on hundreds of other sites, that is exactly what we do every week at OYM.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
Book my free audit