A 10-minute check on your own website

Grab your phone, turn off the wifi, and use cell data instead. That part is not optional. Office wifi is fast, your laptop is fast, and neither one is what your customer is standing on when they pull up your site from a job site or their kitchen with two bars of signal. Test on what they actually have, not on what makes your site look good.

Run through these ten checks in order. Each one is pass or fail. You will know which within a few seconds of trying it.

1. Loads in under about three seconds

Close the tab, clear it from memory if your phone lets you, and open the site fresh from a Google search rather than a bookmark. Count roughly how long it takes before you can read the headline and tap anything. Under about three seconds is a pass. If you are counting past five, a chunk of your visitors never see the rest of this list, because they are already gone.

2. Phone number is tappable, not an image or plain text

Find the phone number on the homepage and tap it with your thumb. A pass opens the dialer with the number already filled in. A fail is a number sitting in an image, or plain text that does nothing when you tap it, which means someone has to copy it by hand or switch apps to write it down.

3. A customer can book or request a time without a phone call

Look for a way to lock in a time or send a request without dialing anyone. A pass is a booking link, a calendar picker, or a form built for scheduling. A fail is a site where the only path forward is “call us,” which is fine for some businesses but is worth knowing is the only door you have open.

4. Service area is stated by name, not “the Lower Mainland and surrounding areas”

Find where the site says who it serves. A pass names actual cities or neighbourhoods. A fail is a phrase broad enough to mean nothing, the kind that makes a reader guess whether you cover their street or not. If they have to guess, plenty will just try the next result instead of calling to find out.

5. There is at least one real photo of your own work

Scroll the homepage looking at every photo. A pass is at least one image that is unmistakably your own job, your own crew, your own truck. A fail is a page built entirely from photos that could belong to any company in the same trade, because a sharp-eyed visitor can usually tell, and it costs you the trust a real photo would have bought instantly.

6. Body text is readable without pinching

Read a full paragraph on the homepage at the size it loads in, no zooming. A pass means the words are comfortable to read at arm’s length. A fail is text so small you catch yourself pinching to zoom, which most people won’t bother doing before they leave.

7. The page uses words a customer would search, not industry terms

Read the headline and the first paragraph out loud. A pass sounds like something a homeowner would type into Google when something breaks. A fail is trade jargon or internal terminology that means something to you and nothing to the person searching for help.

8. Name, address, and phone match your Google listing exactly

Open your Google Business Profile in a second tab and compare it line by line against your website’s footer. A pass is an exact match, down to how the street name is abbreviated. A fail is any mismatch at all, even a small one, because that inconsistency is one of the things that quietly holds a listing back in local search.

9. Nothing visibly out of date

Look at the footer, the service list, and anywhere a price appears. A pass has no leftover year that no longer matches, no service you dropped months ago still advertised, and no price you would no longer honour if someone pointed at it. A fail on this one tells a visitor nobody has touched the site in a while, which makes them wonder what else has been left unattended.

10. Something useful happens after a form is submitted, and it actually arrives

Fill out whatever contact or quote form exists and send it as if you were a real customer. A pass shows a clear confirmation and the submission actually lands in your inbox or phone, not a spam folder you never check. A fail is a blank redirect, a broken confirmation, or a message that never turns up on your end at all. This is the check most owners skip because it is their own site, and it is the one most worth actually doing.

If you failed three or more

Fix them in this order, not whichever feels most urgent in the moment.

1. Make the phone number tappable. It takes minutes and it is the single easiest fix on this list.
2. Add a way to book or request a time without a call.
3. State your service area by name.
4. Everything else, in whatever order suits you.

That order exists because the first two are what turn a visitor into a job, and the third stops the wrong visitors from wasting your time on the first two.

One note if you have also read where your after-hours calls actually go, which lists these fixes in a different order. That piece is ordered by what costs least, so stating your service area comes before adding booking, since one is an afternoon of editing and the other is real work. This list is ordered by what wins you the most jobs. Both are right, on their own terms. If money is the constraint, use that order. If time is, use this one.

If you want to see what a site built to pass all ten looks like in practice, the Gleam Pro Cleaning build is a real example, shipped and live, not a mockup.

If you ran through this and found more wrong than you expected, that is worth fifteen minutes on a call, and there is no pitch attached to it, just a second set of eyes on what you already have.