Most business owners never check their own website's technical health because they assume it requires expensive software or a developer standing by. It doesn't. Fifteen minutes and a few free tools will surface the majority of problems we find on paid audits, and we'd rather tell you that honestly than pretend it's all proprietary wizardry.
Minute one to three: is Google actually indexing you?
Open Search Console, if you've got it set up, and check the Pages report under Indexing. Look for a sudden drop in indexed pages, or a spike in "not indexed" pages that weren't there a month ago. No Search Console account at all is itself a red flag worth noting; we still find Essex businesses, genuinely established ones with years of trading behind them, that have never connected one, meaning they've been flying blind on exactly this kind of issue the entire time.
If you don't have Search Console, search "site:yourdomain.com" directly into Google and roughly compare the number of results against how many pages you believe your site actually has. A huge mismatch in either direction is worth investigating properly.
Setting up Search Console itself takes about five minutes and costs nothing whatsoever, which makes it genuinely baffling how many established Essex businesses skip it entirely. We asked a Chelmsford joiner once why he'd never connected it. "Nobody ever told me I should," he said, perfectly reasonably. Nobody had. His previous web designer had built the site, taken payment, and moved on, leaving no instructions about the free tools that would have told him, instantly, whenever something needed attention. We set it up for him there and then, on the spot, during what was meant to be a short introductory call that ended up running well past the hour, because once he saw what the Pages report could actually tell him, he had a dozen more questions he suddenly wanted answered.
Minute three to six: run a real speed test, on mobile
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights, paste your homepage URL in, and read the mobile score specifically, not desktop, because mobile is where most of your actual visitors are likely to land. Anything below 50 needs attention soon. Anything below 30 is actively losing you visitors right now, every single day, whether or not anyone at the business has noticed yet.
Don't stop at the homepage either. We checked a Billericay garden landscaping firm's site last year where the homepage scored a respectable 78, genuinely fine, but their contact page, the single most important page on the entire site for actually converting a visitor into an enquiry, scored 31 because of an unoptimised background video someone had added for atmosphere and promptly forgotten about.
Minute six to eight: check for broken links
A free broken link checker, there are several good ones, will scan your site in under two minutes and list anything returning a 404. Every broken link is a small dead end for both visitors and search engines, and they accumulate quietly over years as pages get moved, renamed, or deleted without anyone updating what pointed at them in the first place.
We ran this for an Epping furniture showroom and found 23 broken internal links, several of them sitting directly in the main navigation menu, visible on every single page of the site, for what turned out to be over a year. Nobody had noticed because nobody ever clicked through their own navigation menu methodically, start to finish, the way an actual new visitor eventually will.
Broken links aren't just a crawling nuisance either. Every single one is a small moment of friction for a real visitor who clicked expecting something useful and got an error page instead. Multiply a handful of these across a buying journey and you've built a surprisingly effective way to lose someone who arrived genuinely interested, ready to buy, and left frustrated instead, blaming the business rather than a link nobody had checked in a year.
Minute eight to ten: check your HTTPS and security basics
Look for the padlock in the browser bar. Then run your domain through a free security header checker, the kind that takes seconds and needs no login. If you're missing basic headers, note it down and get a developer to add them; it's cheap, quick, and genuinely worth doing properly rather than putting off indefinitely.
- Confirm HTTPS is active on every page, not just the homepage, including forms and checkout pages specifically
- Check there's no mixed content warning anywhere, which happens when a secure page loads an insecure resource
- Scan for basic security headers using any free online checker
- Make sure old "www" or "non-www" versions of your domain redirect properly to whichever one you actually use
Minute ten to twelve: test it on an actual phone, not just a tool
Tools are useful, but nothing replaces actually opening your own site on a real phone, ideally an older one if you or someone in the office has one knocking about in a drawer somewhere. Tap through the main pages. Try filling in the contact form with clumsy thumbs. A surprising number of sites that pass every automated test still have a booking button that's genuinely fiddly to tap accurately on a smaller screen.
A Stanford-le-Hope driving instructor's booking form looked fine on every tool we ran it through, scored well, no obvious errors flagged anywhere. On an actual mid-range Android phone, the submit button sat half a centimetre below the visible screen fold, meaning plenty of visitors likely never even saw it existed, let alone tapped it.
Minute twelve to fourteen: check your sitemap and robots.txt
Type yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml directly into the browser and check it actually loads, lists real URLs, and isn't throwing an error of any kind. Then check yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure nothing important is accidentally blocked from being crawled, which happens more often than you'd expect, usually left over from when a site was still in development and nobody remembered to remove the block before launch.
We've found this exact mistake, an entire site accidentally disallowed in robots.txt, on at least three separate client sites over the years, each time left over from a developer forgetting to flip one setting before handing the finished site over. It's a thirty-second check that can save an entire quarter of invisible traffic, which is exactly why it's one of the first things we verify through our own technical review process rather than assuming a developer handover went smoothly. One of those three sites had been sitting fully blocked for nearly eight months before anyone noticed the traffic graph had flatlined at zero and actually went looking for a cause.
Minute fourteen to fifteen: write down what you found
This is the step everyone skips, and it's arguably the most important one of the lot. Note what you found, even roughly, even just a scribbled list on a notepad by the kettle. Problems that get written down get fixed eventually. Problems that live only in someone's memory of "oh yeah, I noticed that once" tend to still be sitting there, unresolved, a year later when somebody else stumbles across them by accident. We fold a more thorough version of exactly this process into every technical audit we carry out for Essex clients, but the bare-bones fifteen-minute version above will catch most of the obvious, costly problems on its own, for free, without needing us at all.
The Bottom Line
You don't need expensive software or a developer on retainer to catch the most common technical problems hurting a small business website. Fifteen minutes, a handful of free tools, and an actual phone in your hand will surface most of what matters. Do it quarterly, write down what you find, and fix the obvious stuff before it quietly costs you another few months of traffic you'll never quite get an accurate number for after the fact.
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