Updated 2026-07-27
Before you spend money on a redesign, find out what is actually wrong. Plenty of sites that feel dated are converting fine, and plenty of beautiful ones are quietly losing customers at one specific step.
Work through these in order. Each takes a minute, and each tells you something different.
The five-second test
Show your homepage to someone who does not know your business, for five seconds, then take it away. Ask them: what does this company do, and who is it for?
If they cannot answer, no amount of visual polish will help — the problem is that your page never says plainly what you do. This is the single most common failure, and it is a writing problem more often than a design one.
Look at it on your actual phone
Not the browser's device preview — a real phone, on mobile data, held at arm's length. Most of your visitors are here.
Check: is the text readable without zooming, do buttons have room to be tapped by a thumb, does anything overflow sideways, and how long before something appears? A site that takes six seconds on 4G has lost most of its visitors before design is even a factor.
Check that the page has a point
Every page should have one thing you want the visitor to do. Name it. Then look at the page and ask whether that action is the most visually prominent thing on it.
If your newsletter box, cookie banner and social icons are all competing with your "get in touch" button, the page has no point — it has a list of options, which converts far worse than a single clear next step.
The trust pass
- Can someone find out who you are — a real name, a real photo, a real location?
- Is there any evidence other people have used you: testimonials with names, logos, numbers, case studies?
- Are prices visible, or at least a range? Hiding all pricing costs you more visitors than a high price does.
- Does contact work in one click, and does the form actually deliver? Test it. Broken contact forms are alarmingly common.
- Anything visibly stale — a 2023 copyright, a dead social link, an announcement about an event that passed — reads as "possibly out of business".
The craft pass
Now, and only now, the visual layer: consistent spacing, a clear size difference between headings and body text, line length capped for readability, no more than two typefaces, and images that are sharp rather than stretched.
These are the items from our amateur-design checklist, and they matter — but they matter after the page communicates, loads and converts. Fixing craft on a page that does not say what you do is polishing a locked door.
What to do with the results
You will usually find that one or two specific things are wrong, not "everything". That is good news: targeted fixes are cheap, redesigns are not. Rebuild only when the structure itself blocks what the business now needs.
If you are not sure which category your problems fall into, that is exactly the kind of thing an outside pair of eyes settles in under an hour.