Free tool
Some websites look lovely and bring in nothing. Others pull work in while looking like they were built in 2016. Ten questions, three minutes, and you'll see which one you've got.
Your website
Answer the ten questions below and the dot moves.
Looks
–/10
Works
–/10
0 of 10 answered
Whether a stranger takes you seriously in the first ten seconds.
1.A stranger lands on your homepage. Within five seconds, do they know what you do and who for?
2.Does it look like it was built this year, rather than five years ago?
3.On a phone: no pinching, no squinting, buttons big enough for a thumb?
4.Is there real proof on the page? Your actual work, real reviews, real faces.
5.Does the copy talk about the customer’s problem before it talks about you?
Whether it turns those strangers into enquiries.
6.Is there one obvious next step on every page?
7.Does it load in under three seconds on mobile data?
8.Can someone book or enquire without starting an email chain?
9.Do you know how many enquiries the site brought you last month?
10.Does it come up when someone searches what you do plus your town?
Almost every conversation I have about a website starts with how it looks. Nobody rings up to say the call-to-action hierarchy is wrong. They say it feels dated, or they're embarrassed to send the link. Fair enough. But that is only one of the two axes on this chart, and it is the one that gets all the attention and most of the budget.
The other axis is duller and worth more money. Can a visitor tell what to do next? Can they book without waiting on a reply? Does the site turn up when someone searches your trade and your town? Do you know what it produced last month? None of that shows up in a screenshot, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Splitting the two apart tells you where to spend. A site that looks dated but generates enquiries is a design job on a working machine. A site that looks beautiful and generates nothing needs plumbing, not a repaint. Get that diagnosis backwards and you spend thousands on the half that was already fine.
If your site sits in the bottom half of this chart, the enquiries guide goes deeper on the fixes. If you want a view on whether to rebuild at all, the website assessment quiz answers that one instead.
Because looking good and working are two separate jobs, and most sites only get one of them done. A visitor can admire your site and still leave without contacting you if there is no clear next step, no way to book without an email chain, and nothing telling them why they should pick you. That is the showroom quadrant in this tool: the expensive half is finished, and the part that produces enquiries was never built.
It depends which half is failing. If it brings in work but looks dated, keep the structure and change the surface. If it looks fine but produces nothing, you need next steps, booking and tracking rather than a new design. If both are failing, a rebuild is usually cheaper than a long run of patches. The Website Rescue service at £40/hour covers targeted fixes, and a full build starts from £900.
75% of people judge a company's credibility by its website design, and that judgement forms in under 50 milliseconds (Stanford Web Credibility Project). Design is not decoration at that speed. It is the first piece of evidence someone has about whether you are any good at your job.
Tracking. If you cannot see how many enquiries the site produced last month, you cannot tell whether anything you change afterwards helped. Once you can measure it, speed is usually the next best return: 40% of visitors leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load, and conversions drop roughly 4.4% for every extra second.
Your next step
You do not need a technical brief. Tell me where you are stuck and what you want the website to do better. I'll reply with a useful next step.