The audit we run before we say yes

Most redesigns are ordered because the owner is bored of the site. That is a real feeling and a bad reason. Before we quote one we spend two hours on the existing site and its numbers, and fairly often the honest answer is "fix three things and keep it." Here is the audit. Run it yourself before you call anyone.

1. Where do visitors come from, and what do they do?

Open the analytics. Which pages get traffic, from where, and which of them lead to a call, a form or an order. If you cannot answer this, the first job is measurement, not design.

2. The five-second test

Show the homepage to a stranger for five seconds. What do they say you do? If it takes a paragraph, the fix is the first sentence, not the layout.

3. Phone, on mobile data

Load the site on a phone off Wi-Fi. Count. Then try to tap the main button with a thumb. Most of your customers meet you exactly like this.

4. Search Console

Which searches bring people in, which pages rank, and whether anything is broken: errors, pages Google cannot read, the mobile report. A site that ranks for the right things should be changed carefully, not thrown away.

5. Google listing versus website

Same name, address, phone and hours in both places? A surprising number of businesses are telling Google two stories.

6. What is it built on?

Theme, page builder, plugins, hosting. A site with forty plugins and a builder is expensive to keep and slow to fix; a small hand-built site is neither. This decides whether "fix three things" is realistic.

7. Who owns what?

The domain, the hosting account, the code. If the answer is "the old agency", sort that before anything else.

8. The content

Is there anything to read? Real photos? Prices? Answers to the questions customers actually ask? Most redesigns fail because the new site has the same nothing to say in a nicer font.

9. The one job

What is the site for — calls, bookings, orders, fewer emails? One sentence. If nobody can say it, no design brief will produce it.

10. What would a stranger fix first?

Ask someone who has never seen the site to use it to do the one job. Watch. Say nothing. The place they get stuck is the first item on the list, whatever the redesign brief says.

What comes out of it

A one-page note: what works, what is broken, and whether it needs a rebuild or a repair. If it is a repair, we quote the repair. If it is a rebuild, you now know exactly why, and the brief writes itself. Send us the address and we will run it — it is the two hours we would spend anyway before saying yes.