Is my website any good? A five-minute test you can do today…
‘Is my website any good?’ is one of the most common questions I get asked. Usually quietly. Usually after a glass of wine. Usually by women who suspect the answer is ‘well there could be some improvements’ but aren’t sure how to check.
So here’s a five-minute test you can do today to find out. And then, because the bigger answer is more interesting than the test, the conversation underneath it.
The five-minute test
Go to your own website. Not from your usual laptop with all your cookies and saved logins, pull it up on your phone, on mobile data, like a stranger would – or go incognito!
Then ask yourself three questions.
- In the first three seconds, can a stranger tell what I do and who I do it for?
- Is there an obvious next step, a button, a form, a way to get in touch, without scrolling?
- Would I trust this website if I’d never met me?
That’s it. Five minutes. Honest answers only.
If your answers wobbled
You’re in good company. Most websites I look at fall down on at least one of these, including some of the really big brands!
A wobbly answer doesn’t mean your website’s bad. It usually means it’s been quietly sitting there for a couple of years doing a slightly different job than the one you need it to do now. Businesses move. Websites should move with them.
But there’s a bigger question hiding behind the test. And it’s the one I keep banging on about, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on Mix Lab calls, probably to my kids who never listen to me anyway. So I’m going to write it down properly here, because it belongs somewhere I actually own.
Most of us run our businesses on rented land
Instagram. Facebook. LinkedIn. TikTok. Even Google, in a sense. Useful land. Busy land. Worth being on. But not ours.
You don’t own your followers. You don’t own your DMs. You don’t own the grid you spent two years building. Instagram does. And while that’s mostly fine, most of the time, it’s also why every few months I see another woman whose account has been hacked, mistakenly banned, or quietly buried by an algorithm change made in California.
It’s not a reason to leave. I’m not leaving. Most of my clients aren’t either. It’s a reason to be honest with ourselves about what we’re building, and where.
The two pieces you actually own
There are only two pieces of marketing that genuinely belong to you.
Your website. And your email list.
Everything else is borrowed. Useful, often essential, sometimes brilliant, but borrowed. Subject to terms and conditions written in small print and changed without notice.
Your website is yours. Nobody can take it down for an algorithm violation. Nobody can lock you out of it because they updated their policies. Nobody decides your “reach” is suddenly going to be 10% of what it used to be.
Your email list is yours too, in the sense that nobody between you and your reader gets to filter what they see. (Mailchimp doesn’t decide that this week, only 3% of your list will hear from you. Imagine if Instagram worked that way. Oh wait, it does.)
This is why the five-minute test matters. Because if your website’s the thing you actually own, it should be earning its place. Not sitting there as an afterthought.
What “owning” your website actually means
This is the bit nobody tells you. Owning your website isn’t one thing, it’s three.
The domain. The address; yourbusiness.co.uk. You should own this directly, in your name. Not your designer’s name. Not the company they used to register it – Yours.
The files. The actual website itself, the pages, the images, the code. If you decided to leave whoever built it tomorrow, you should be able to take everything with you. If the answer is ‘well, technically, it’s hosted on our system’ – that’s not really ownership. That’s a tenancy.
The hosting. The space on the internet where your website lives. This can be with whoever built your site, or somewhere completely separate, but you should know who it’s with, what you’re paying, and how to leave if you ever need to.
If any of those three things are vague to you right now, that’s worth knowing. It doesn’t mean anything’s gone wrong. It just means there’s a question worth asking the next time you speak to whoever looks after your site.
What “owning” your email list actually means
Two hundred engaged people on an email list will, most weeks, beat five thousand Instagram followers.
That sounds counter-intuitive. It isn’t.
When you post on Instagram, a small percentage of your followers will see it. The exact number depends on the algorithm that day, the time you posted, whether the platform’s testing something new, whether your post matches what they think people want to see this week.
When you send an email, it lands in the inbox of every single person on your list. Some won’t open it. That’s fine, they’re free to not. But the people who do open it are reading something that came directly from you. Not filtered. Not ranked. Not buried under three reels and an ad for trainers.
That’s a different kind of relationship.
It’s also why a list you’ve grown patiently over two years, even a small one, is one of the most valuable things in your business.
What to actually do about it
If the five-minute test wobbled, there are a few options. The honest answer is that they depend on where you are.
If your website is broadly working but a bit tired, sometimes the right answer is a refresh, same site, sharper copy, a few new pages, a tidier user journey.
If your website was built five years ago on a platform you can’t update yourself, the right answer might be a rebuild on something you can, so the next time you want to add a service or change a price, you can do it on a Tuesday morning with a cup of tea.
If you don’t have a website yet, or you’re running everything off a single landing page, the right answer is to start with something small that’s actually yours, and grow it from there.
I’ll be writing more about each of these over the coming weeks. I’ve also got a self-audit tool I’m finishing off, a more thorough version of the five-minute test above. When it’s ready, I’ll share it on the newsletter first.
In the meantime, do the five-minute version. And if any of your answers wobbled, that’s fine, it’s just useful information.