Website improvements checklist: what to fix before a redesign

Start with a 20-minute walk-through on your phone

Many website improvement lists are written for marketers: blog more, add pop-ups, chase rankings. For a service business, the improvements that pay off are plainer. A customer should see what you do, trust that you’re open and real, and reach you in under a minute, usually on a phone.

So start where they do. Take your own phone, switch off Wi-Fi, and open your site as if you’d never seen it. Try the three things customers do most: find a service, check that you cover their area or are open today, and get in touch. Send a real request through every form. Write down every snag, however small. Then hand the phone to someone who doesn’t know your business and ask them to find a price and send a request. Watch where they pause. If you have an iPhone, try an Android too, or the other way round.

Then sort the list in this order. It puts the problems that cost you work ahead of the ones that only look dated:

• First, anything that stops a request reaching you: a phone number that won’t tap to call, a broken form, requests that land nowhere.
• Second, anything that isn’t true any more: hours, prices, services, towns or staff.
• Third, anything that makes the site slow or hard to use on a phone.
• Fourth, anything unsafe underneath: security warnings, parts nobody updates, logins nobody can find.
• Last, looks: dated photos, fonts and colors. They matter, but on their own they rarely cost you a job.

Fix what stops requests from reaching you

This is where small fixes pay back fastest. A visitor who taps your number and nothing happens, or sends a form that never arrives, may not try twice. They call the next company on the list instead.

Check each item on a phone, not a laptop:

• The top of the homepage says what you do and where you work in one plain line, with your phone number and a request button in view before anyone scrolls.
• Your phone number is a tap-to-call link everywhere it appears, including the header and footer. On a phone, a “tel:” link starts the call. A number typed as plain text, or shown inside an image, may not.
• Every form sends to an inbox someone checks every working day, and two people get a copy, so one person’s day off doesn’t stall requests.
• Forms ask only what you need to call back or price the job. Name, phone, town and what’s wrong is often enough for a first request.
• Phone and email fields bring up the right keyboard. A field set up as a phone number shows a number pad on most phones.
• Each field has a visible label, and a mistake gets a clear message that keeps what the person already typed. W3C’s forms guidance covers labels, instructions, and messages for success and for errors.
• The thank-you message says what happens next, like “We call back within one business day,” so nobody sends the same request twice.
• If your team quotes from photos, the request form lets people add photos straight from their phone.

References: MDN Web Docs: The anchor element (tel: links) (opens in a new tab) · MDN Web Docs: <input type="tel"> (opens in a new tab) · W3C WAI: Forms tutorial (opens in a new tab)

Follow a request past the website

Plenty of sites “work” in the sense that the form sends. The trouble starts after. For example, a 6-truck HVAC company’s form emails each request to the owner. The owner forwards it to the office, someone retypes it into the schedule, and nobody can say later whether every request got a call back.

A new design doesn’t fix that. The improvement is sending requests straight to where your team tracks the work, like a shared inbox, a calendar or a job list. Each request should show who replied and when. If requests aren’t arriving at all, that’s a different problem: start with what to check when a website form stops sending.

Send one test request and follow it all the way:

• Where does it land, and who sees it first?
• Does anyone retype it into a calendar, spreadsheet or job app?
• How would you know if a request never got a reply?
• If the customer calls a week later, can anyone find what they sent?
• Does the customer get an email saying you received it?
• How many requests came in last month, by form and by phone? Write the numbers down now so you can tell later whether the fixes helped.

Make every page true today

Wrong details cost trust quickly. A customer who drives over during your posted hours and finds the door locked won’t trust the site again. Old prices lead to awkward calls. A service you dropped brings in requests you have to turn down.

Go page by page with a notes app and mark anything that isn’t true today. Then ask who can fix it. If every change waits on the old web person, pay for pages your team can edit. Our guide on how to update website content without breaking it shows what that takes.

Check these on every page, not just the homepage:

• Hours, including holiday hours and any seasonal changes.
• Phone, email and address, the same everywhere they appear.
• The services you offer now, and none you’ve dropped.
• The towns or neighborhoods you serve, written out as text, not only shown on a map image.
• Prices or price ranges, if you show them, and any offer that has ended.
• Team names and photos of people who still work there.
• License, insurance or certification details that are current.
• The copyright year in the footer. A year long gone can make a site look abandoned.
• Every menu item, button and link goes somewhere real: no error pages, no “coming soon” pages and no links to services you’ve dropped.

Make it fast and easy to use on a phone

Run your homepage and your busiest service page through PageSpeed Insights, Google’s free tool. It tests each page on phones and desktops and lists what to improve. Results are labeled good, needs improvement or poor, so you don’t need to know the numbers. Google’s Core Web Vitals set the bar for good. The main content shows within 2.5 seconds. The page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds. Little or nothing jumps around as it loads. Google counts a page as passing when at least 3 in 4 page loads meet all three. If your site doesn’t get enough visits, PageSpeed Insights can’t show Google’s real-visitor data. Then you’ll see only the lab test, which still points to the problems. Treat the score as a pointer, not a grade.

On small business sites, photos are a common cause. A photo straight off a phone can be far bigger than the space it fills on screen. PageSpeed Insights flags images whose files are bigger than they need to be, including ones larger than the size they’re shown at, because the extra data slows the page.

Ease of use matters for the same customers. Some read without their glasses, in bright sun or with a screen reader. The web’s accessibility standard, WCAG, gives concrete targets that make the site easier for everyone. If you have a storefront, our article on website accessibility for storefront businesses goes further. Check these:

• Photos resized and compressed before they’re uploaded, and one strong photo at the top instead of a slider of five.
• No video that plays by itself at the top of the page, and no chat bubble or pop-up covering the call button.
• Old tracking codes and widgets you no longer use removed from every page.
• Text with a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background, or 3:1 for large text, so people who struggle with faint text can still read it.
• Buttons, menu items and other things people tap at least 24 by 24 pixels, or spaced apart so a thumb hits the right one. Links inside a sentence of text are an exception.
• A short text description, called alt text, on photos that carry information, so a screen reader can read it aloud. Purely decorative photos are marked as decorative.
• Every link, button and form field reachable with the Tab key, with a visible outline on the one you’ve tabbed to.

References: Google for Developers: About PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab) · web.dev: Web Vitals (opens in a new tab) · Chrome for Developers: Improve image delivery (Lighthouse insight) (opens in a new tab) · W3C WAI: Understanding WCAG 2.2, Contrast (Minimum) (opens in a new tab) · W3C WAI: Understanding WCAG 2.2, Target Size (Minimum) (opens in a new tab) · W3C WAI: Images tutorial (opens in a new tab) · W3C WAI: Understanding WCAG 2.2, Keyboard (opens in a new tab) · W3C WAI: Understanding WCAG 2.2, Focus Visible (opens in a new tab)

Check what’s underneath: security, updates and logins

Some problems don’t show on the page until they cause trouble. If Chrome shows “Not secure” next to your address, the site isn’t using a private connection. Chrome warns that someone may be able to see or change what visitors send, and that includes what they type into your form.

Updates matter most. Many small business sites run on a platform plus add-ons, like WordPress with a theme and plugins. CISA, the US government’s cybersecurity agency, says attackers may go after known weak spots for months or even years after a fix is out. It advises retiring software that has stopped getting updates.

Check these yourself, or ask whoever looks after the site:

• Every page, including the form, opens on https with no “Not secure” warning.
• The platform, theme and plugins are up to date, and none has been abandoned by its maker.
• Plugins and add-ons you no longer use are removed, so there’s less to keep updated.
• Old logins are gone: past staff, past web people and test users.
• Backups run on a schedule, and someone has tried restoring one. A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a plan.
• The domain, hosting and website admin logins are held by your business, under an email you control.
• Someone is named to do this every month. Our list of what website maintenance includes covers how often each job comes round.

References: Google Chrome Help: Check if a site’s connection is secure (opens in a new tab) · CISA: Understanding Patches and Software Updates (opens in a new tab)

Website improvements that matter most in your trade

The checklist above fits any service business. Some fixes carry more weight in certain trades. Here are examples of what we’d check first, by the kind of work you do:

• HVAC, plumbing and electrical: a tap-to-call button at the top of every page and a plain statement of whether you take after-hours calls. Write out the towns you cover, and give the request form photo upload and an “is this urgent?” choice.
• Remodelers and builders: project photos labeled with what was done, and current license details. A request form that asks for the type of project and rough timing makes the first call useful.
• Cafés and restaurants: the menu as text on the page, not a PDF or a photo. It reads on a phone, and a price change takes a minute. Add current hours, holiday closures, and one catering or large-order form that lands in a single list.
• Shops and showrooms: hours, address and parking, the brands or ranges you carry, your delivery area and days, and a special-order request form.
• Property managers: a tenant maintenance request form that asks for the unit and accepts photos. Keep the vacancy list to units that are actually available, and give property owners their own inquiry form.

When a redesign is the better spend

Improvements make sense when the site’s base is sound: it works on phones, your team can edit it, and the parts underneath still get updates. Then a handful of focused fixes gets you most of what a redesign or full website makeover would, for less money and in less time.

Add up the fixes on your list and get them priced, then compare the total with what a website redesign costs. If the fixes come close to that, or every fix uncovers two more, stop patching. From there, our guide to when and how to redesign a website covers the steps and how long it takes.

A redesign is usually the better spend when:

• The layout breaks on phones everywhere, so you’d be fixing every page, not one or two.
• Nobody can edit the site without the old web person, who has moved on, so every fix waits on someone outside the business.
• It runs on a theme, plugins or a platform that no longer gets updates, so each fix sits on parts that are already a risk.
• Your services, towns or name have changed so much that most pages need rewriting anyway.
• You want the site to do something new, like put bookings in your calendar or send requests into a job system, and neither the current setup nor an off-the-shelf add-on can do it. Often a ready-made booking or form tool fits into the site you have.

How we handle website improvements

Our team looks after websites we built and ones we didn’t. For a site someone else built, we review it first: how it’s built, who has access and what shape it’s in. Then we tell you which fixes are worth making, and whether a redesign would be the better spend.

A focused fix, like a new request form, a booking page or faster photos, is typically $750–$3,000 and takes 1–⁠2 weeks. A new website of 5 to 8 pages, with a request or booking form and pages you can edit yourself, is typically $2,500–$6,000 over 3–⁠6 weeks. If your fix list adds up to more than that, we’ll say so. These are our prices as of October 4, 2026.

Requests can go to Gmail or Outlook, bookings to Google Calendar, and card payments through Stripe or Square. Every launch includes 30 days of fixes. After that, a monthly plan, priced in your quote, keeps the site updated and covers small changes. Calls run Monday to Friday, 7 am to noon Pacific.

The first call is free, and you get a fixed price in writing within 48 hours of it. See how our website and software support works, then book a first call and bring the notes from your phone walk-through.