The Signal Audit: Your Website

You can’t tell whether your website looks unprofessional. That’s not a knock on you, it’s just structurally impossible, because you built the thing or paid for it and you’ve now looked at it several hundred times.

So the audit below doesn’t ask you to look harder. It borrows somebody else’s eyes and runs four specific passes across the page, each one checking a different thing. Twenty minutes total. No tools, no analytics, no software.

Before you start, one rule. You need another human. A spouse, a friend, somebody at the coffee shop who owes you a favor. Ideally somebody who doesn’t really know what you do for a living, because that’s who’s actually landing on your site. If you try to run this alone you’ll get a lovely score and learn nothing.

pass one: the one second pass

Open your homepage on somebody else’s laptop. Let them look at it for one second. Close it.

Then ask two questions. What kind of business was that? Describe it in three words.

You’re not testing whether they can read. Nobody reads in a second. Research on first impressions puts visual judgments somewhere around fifty milliseconds, so a full second is generous. You’re testing what the frame said on its own.

How to score it. If the three words are “clean,” “professional,” and “nice,” that’s a fail. Those are the words people reach for when nothing specific landed. It’s a shrug with better manners. If they can’t name the category of business at all, that’s a bigger fail and it’s more common than you’d think.

Write down exactly what they said. Don’t clean it up.

pass two: the number pass

Same person, same page. This time let them look for ten seconds. Then ask one question.

If you hired this business, what do you think it would cost?

Let them guess. Push them for an actual number, because “I don’t know” is an easy out and everybody has a guess in there somewhere.

How to score it. Compare their number to what you actually charge. If it comes in under, you’ve found the gap, and you’ve found it in the exact form your prospects experience it. The number they arrive with is the one your price gets measured against, and it got built out of whatever was on that page.

If their guess is close to your real pricing, congratulations, skip to pass three. That’s rarer than you’d hope.

pass three: the proof pass

Now you do this one yourself, and it’s the slowest of the four.

Open your site and go looking for anything a stranger could actually verify. Not claims. Not adjectives. Things a skeptical person could confirm or at least take seriously as evidence that this business is real and has been running a while.

Real client names, with permission. Specific results with numbers attached. Photographs of the actual place you work. Photos of you doing the work rather than posing near it. Length of time in business, stated plainly. Anything that would be a genuine pain to fake.

Now count what you found.

How to score it. Under three, you’re presenting as a new business whether you are one or not, and new reads as riskier than established. Three to six is normal. More than six and you’re in decent shape on this one.

While you’re in there, notice how much of the page is stock photography or illustration. Every one of those is a spot where evidence could have gone and didn’t.

pass four: the two year pass

Piece of paper. Write down the five most significant things that have happened in your business in the last two years. Clients, results, credentials, capabilities, anything you’d be proud to say out loud.

Now go find them on the site.

How to score it. Most people find one. If you find zero, your site is describing a version of your business that stopped existing a while ago, and you’re the only person who can’t hear that.

Worth knowing what normal looks like here. One web design firm found the average lifespan of their clients’ sites was over six years between redesigns. Six years is longer than most people’s entire current phase of business. And the section that ages worst, according to designers who do this for a living, is the staff photos and bios, with most recommending new images every one to three years.

So if your headshot predates the last two years of your business, you’re not behind on maintenance. You’re publishing inaccurate information about yourself.

[Eric, this is your paragraph. What do you actually see when somebody sends you their site for the first time? The specific thing that’s wrong on almost every one of them. Say it plainly, no hedging. It’ll be the most quoted line in the piece.]

what to fix first

You now have four scores. Here’s the order, and it’s not the order you’d guess.

If pass four failed, start there. Outdated is the cheapest problem to fix and it does the most damage, because it’s the one actively lying about you. New photographs and a rewritten about section will move it more than anything else on the list.

If pass three failed, that’s second. Evidence is additive. You don’t have to redesign anything to add three specific, verifiable things to a page.

If pass two failed but three and four passed, you have a presentation problem rather than a content problem.Everything true is on the page, and it’s being presented in a way that suggests a smaller business than you’re running. That’s usually visual and it’s usually the images.

If pass one failed and everything else passed, it’s the hero. The top of your page isn’t doing any work. Fix that one thing before touching anything else.

And the reason this order works is that most people do it backwards. They redesign the whole site, which takes four months and eight thousand dollars, when the actual problem was that the photo was from 2021 and there was nothing on the page a stranger could confirm.

the part most people skip

Run the audit. Then run it again in six months with a different person.

Not because the site changed. Because you did, and the whole point of this is that the gap reopens quietly every time you get better at your job. That’s not a flaw in the process, it’s the process. Signals are something you maintain, not something you finish.

The next audit in this series looks at your LinkedIn profile, which for most service businesses is getting more traffic than the website is and receives roughly none of the attention.

Want somebody else to run this on your site?

That’s the whole problem with auditing your own work, and it’s why pass one needs a stranger.

Send me your website and I’ll run all four passes on it and tell you what I actually see. No pitch, no obligation, just an honest read from somebody who does this all day.

Start here

Eric Coleman is a brand photographer in Austin, Texas.