Most website problems sit undetected for months. Not because they're hard to spot, but because nobody looked. These five checks take about five minutes total, require no technical knowledge, and will tell you whether your site has a problem worth investigating. You only need a phone, a laptop, and a Google search bar.
1 Run the speed test — 1 minute
Go to the SimpleFastSEO grader, enter your website URL, and wait for the results. Two numbers matter here: your Performance score and your SEO score. Both run from 0 to 100.
If either score comes back under 70, something is worth looking at. A low Performance score usually means the site is slow to load, which affects both user experience and how Google ranks you. A low SEO score means basic technical signals are missing or misconfigured.
You don't need to understand the individual issues at this stage. The score gives you a clear signal: fine, or flagged. That's enough for now.
2 The 5-second test — 30 seconds
Open your homepage on a phone. Not your laptop. A real phone, ideally on mobile data rather than your office Wi-Fi. Set a five-second timer, look away, then look back when it goes off.
Ask yourself three questions: Can you tell what the business does? Can you tell where it operates? Is there something obvious to tap or click? If the answer to any of those is no, you have a conversion problem. This is separate from SEO. A site can rank well and still lose customers the moment they arrive because the page doesn't communicate quickly enough.
Google and SOASTA research from 2017 found that most mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. The exact threshold may have shifted since then, but the direction of effect hasn't: slower equals fewer people staying. The five-second test catches both a slow site and a confusing one.
3 Google yourself — 1 minute
Search your business name on Google. Look at what comes up. Two things to check here.
First: does a Knowledge Panel appear on the right side of the results (desktop) or near the top (mobile)? This is the box showing your address, phone number, hours, and photos. If it appears, make sure the information is accurate. Wrong phone numbers and outdated hours are surprisingly common and genuinely cost enquiries.
Second: search [your service] [your town]. Something like "plumber Bristol" or "wedding photographer Edinburgh." Do you appear on page 1? If you're not visible for your core service in your own town, that's the most direct evidence of an SEO gap. Everything else on this list is diagnostic. This search tells you the actual outcome.
4 Check if Google can find your pages — 1 minute
Open Google and type site:yourwebsite.com (replacing the example with your actual domain). Hit enter.
Google will show you a list of pages from your site that it has indexed. Scroll through and check whether your main pages are there: homepage, services, contact, any key location pages. If a page isn't showing, Google hasn't indexed it, which means it can't rank for anything.
If the search returns no results at all, that's a serious indexing problem. Your entire site is invisible to search. This is fixable, but it needs attention quickly. A result of a handful of pages when you expected dozens is also worth investigating.
5 Check your title tags — 1 minute
On your laptop, open your homepage in Chrome. Right-click anywhere on the page and select View Page Source. A new tab opens showing the raw code. Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) and search for <title>.
You'll see something like <title>Home | My Business</title>. This is what Google displays as the clickable headline in search results. Ask yourself: does it say what you do and where you do it? A title tag that just says "Home" or your business name tells Google nothing useful.
Also check the length. Title tags over roughly 60 characters get cut off in search results, so the full text never shows. Aim for something clear, specific, and within that limit. For example: Wedding Photography in Glasgow | Studio Name is far more useful than Welcome to Our Website.
Repeat this for your services page and any other important pages.
What to do with what you found
If everything looks fine across all five checks, that's genuinely good news. Make a note to rerun these after any significant changes to the site: a redesign, a new plugin, a platform migration. Things that work can break quietly.
If one thing flagged, it's worth reading more about that specific issue or having a short conversation with someone who knows the area. A single problem is usually fixable without much disruption.
If multiple things flagged, resist the urge to fix everything at once without a plan. Working on five problems simultaneously, without knowing which one is causing the most damage, tends to produce slow results and a lot of wasted effort. A proper audit tells you which issue to address first and why, so the work you do has the most impact.
These five checks don't replace a full audit. What they do is give you enough information to decide whether an audit is worth having, and what to say when you have that conversation.