Website readiness score

1. Open your website in another tab, on a phone if you can. This matters more than it sounds.
2. Work through the twenty-three statements and tick only the ones that are true today.
3. Resist ticking things you intend to do or believe are there. The gap between belief and reality is the commonest finding here.
4. Read the six dimension bars — each is scored against its own ceiling, so they are directly comparable.
5. Read the list of what a stranger still cannot tell about you. That is the actual to-do list.
6. Do the one prescribed fix for your weakest axis this week, then come back and rescore.

The single highest-yield check on the list is submitting your own contact form and confirming the email arrives. A silently broken form is the most expensive fault a small business website can have, and it is invisible from the outside.

• Clarity of offer. Whether a stranger can tell what you sell, to whom, and where, without scrolling. Everything else on the site is wasted if this fails, because they leave before reaching it.
• Reachability. How many taps between arriving and being in touch. Every extra step loses a measurable share of people, and a broken contact form loses all of them silently.
• Proof. Whether there is any reason to believe you beyond your own claims. Reviews, photographs of real work, licence numbers, a named human being.
• Findability. Whether search engines and maps can connect this site to a real local business. Mostly about consistency between your site and your Google Business Profile.
• Usability on a phone. Whether it works for the majority of your visitors, who are on a small screen, often on a poor connection, often outdoors.
• Follow-up. What happens after someone gets in touch. The most-skipped dimension, and the one where a perfect site loses to a worse one that replies in ten minutes.

Each dimension is scored against its own ceiling before the total is calculated, which means the six count equally regardless of how many checks each contains. Without that normalisation, an axis with more questions would quietly dominate the score — a bug that looks exactly like a result.

"Your proof score is 42%" is a grade. It tells you where you sit relative to an abstract ceiling and it is easy to file away as a thing to look at later.

"After visiting your site, a stranger still does not know whether anyone has been happy with your work" is a description of a person standing in front of your website, deciding whether to call you, and lacking something they needed. That is harder to file away, and it points directly at the fix.

The list is ordered by the weight of each failed check rather than by where it appears on your page, so the first item is the one costing you most. In practice the top of that list is nearly always one of three things: how to reach you right now, whether you cover their area, or whether anyone has vouched for you.

A visitor arriving at a local business website is not reading. They are scanning for confirmation that they are in the right place, and the decision to stay or leave is made in a handful of seconds, largely on the first screenful.

That is why the clarity checks are all about what is visible without scrolling, and why an opening line like "Quality you can trust since 1998" scores nothing. It is a sentence that could belong to any business in any trade, so it fails the only test that matters at that moment: is this page about my problem?

The replacement is not clever copywriting. It is a plain statement of trade and place — "Emergency plumber in Boise" — which feels almost too obvious to write and outperforms every alternative. The owners most resistant to this are usually the ones who feel their business deserves something more distinctive; the visitor, who has four other tabs open, disagrees.

Most owners look at their website on the machine they built it on, over good broadband, at a screen size their customers do not have. The result is that entire categories of problem are invisible to them.

Open the site on your phone, with Wi-Fi turned off. Watch how long it takes to become readable. Try to tap the phone number. Read a paragraph of body text without zooming. Try to submit the contact form with one thumb while standing up.

This takes four minutes and reliably finds something. The usual culprits are photographs uploaded at full camera resolution, making the page slow on mobile data; text sized for a desktop screen; and tap targets too small or too close together to hit reliably.

It is worth doing this on the oldest phone in your household rather than the newest. Your customers are not all on this year's model, and a page that is merely slow on yours can be unusable on theirs.

Follow-up is on this list because the most common way a website fails is not a design fault. It is that an enquiry arrived and nothing happened — the notification went to an address nobody reads, or it landed in spam, or it was seen on Saturday and remembered on Wednesday.

In local services, the first credible reply wins a large share of the work. A customer who has enquired with three businesses is, in practice, choosing among whoever answers, and the second reply is competing against a conversation already in progress.

The three checks in this dimension take about half an hour between them: route the form to the inbox on your phone, add a confirmation message so the submitter knows it worked, and set yourself a rule for when you reply. None of it is technical and all of it is worth more than another round of design changes.

Test the form quarterly, not once. Forms break silently when a plugin updates, an email provider changes, or a spam filter gets more aggressive — and nobody tells you, because the person whose enquiry vanished has already called someone else.