Five free checks that tell you if your website is working

Website problems get sold as mysterious. They mostly aren't. Most of what's wrong with a small business site shows up in twenty minutes of looking, using tools that cost nothing and require no expertise.

Do these in order. Each one tells you something different, and together they'll point at whatever's actually wrong.

Check one: PageSpeed Insights

Go to Google's PageSpeed Insights, paste in your homepage address, and read the mobile tab, not desktop. You'll get four scores out of 100: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO.

Anything from 90 to 100 is good. From 50 to 89 needs work. Below 50 is a genuine problem.

Performance under 50 on mobile usually means a heavy theme, oversized images, or too many plugins. A low SEO score usually means basic structure is missing and is often cheap to fix. Run it on a service page too, not just the homepage, because that's where people frequently land.

Check two: how many of your pages Google actually has

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com — your own domain, no spaces. The results are the pages Google has indexed.

Count them roughly. If your site has fifteen pages and Google shows three, something is stopping the rest being found. That's a fixable problem, and until it's fixed nothing else you do to those pages matters.

Check three: search for yourself the way a customer would

Not your business name — anyone can rank for their own name. Search the exact service and town you want to be found for, the way a stranger would type it. "Plumber Arvada." "Bathroom remodel Denver."

Look at where you appear, including the map results at the top. If you're nowhere in the first three pages, you have a visibility problem rather than a conversion one, and that's a different fix.

Check four: your robots file

Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser. You'll see a short text file.

Look for lines saying Disallow: /. If a crawler is listed with that instruction, it's being blocked from your entire site. This happens by accident constantly — a security plugin adds it, or a host enables it by default, or a theme shipped with it. Sites regularly sit invisible to Google or to AI assistants for months because nobody ever looked at this file.

Check five: ask an AI assistant about your business

Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask for a recommendation the way a customer would — "who does kitchen remodeling in Lakewood?" Then ask directly what it knows about your business by name.

If the answer is vague, wrong, or it can't find you, that's what a growing share of your potential customers are experiencing. People increasingly ask an assistant instead of scrolling results, and being absent from that answer is invisible in a way that never shows up in your analytics.

What to do with what you find

Write the results down. Five numbers and two yes-or-no answers. That page of notes is worth more than most paid audits, and it means any conversation you have with a web designer starts from evidence rather than from their sales pitch.

It also lets you check them. Run PageSpeed on the website of whoever is pitching you. A company whose own site scores badly on mobile is telling you something about what yours will look like.