5 Questions Every Business Owner Should Be Able to Answer About Their Website

You don't need to understand code to know whether your website is working. You just need to be honest with yourself.

These five questions aren't technical. They're not a quiz. They're the kind of thing a good advisor would ask you over coffee if they wanted to give you a straight answer about the health of your online presence. If any of them make you uncomfortable, that discomfort is valuable information.

1Can a stranger understand what you do in 10 seconds?

Pull up your homepage. Pretend you've never heard of your business. In 10 seconds, can you tell what this company does, who they help, and why you'd choose them?

If you have to read three paragraphs to figure that out, your website is already losing people. Most visitors give you a fraction of that time before they decide whether to stay or leave.

2How does your site look on a phone?

More than half of all web traffic, often 60 to 70 percent for local businesses, comes from mobile phones. Pull up your website on yours right now.

Is the text readable without zooming? Do the buttons and menus work with your thumb? Does it load in a reasonable amount of time? If the mobile experience is clunky, you're failing more than half your visitors every single day.

3Do you know how many people visited your site last month?

If you can't answer this, you're running a business asset blind. You wouldn't go a month without looking at your bank account. Your website traffic is equally important information.

Google Analytics is free. If it's not set up on your site, you're flying completely blind. If it is set up but you never look at it, that's almost the same problem.

4When did you last update your website?

Not the copyright year. Not the color scheme. The actual content. When did you last add a new service, update your hours, publish something useful, or add a recent photo?

Google notices when a website goes quiet. So do visitors. A website that hasn't changed in two years sends a subtle message that the business might not be active or invested. Freshness matters more than most people think.

5What do you want visitors to do, and does your site make that obvious?

Every business website should have a primary action it wants visitors to take. Call us. Request a quote. Schedule a consultation. Book online. Whatever it is, that action should be easy to find and hard to miss.

If your website doesn't have a clear, prominent call to action on every page, you are leaving decisions up to people who don't know your business and have other options open in other tabs.

None of these questions require a developer to answer. They just require honesty.

If you answered "I don't know" or "not great" to more than one of these, your website has room to improve, and that improvement has a direct dollar value attached to it.