Ten checks that are easy to miss

A small business site is usually built once, with care, and then edited for years by people who are busy running the business. That is how pages lose their titles, headings go out of order, images arrive without alt text and the phone number quietly disappears from the contact page during a redesign.

None of these faults break the site. All of them cost it something: a search result that shows a URL instead of a headline, a visitor who cannot find a way to get in touch, a page that is unreadable on a phone. Below are ten checks that are cheap to run, easy to fail and quick to fix. Each one is among the checks our hosted website audit runs against the public pages of a site, so every one of them can be confirmed from the outside, without a login and without touching a file.

Search basics

1. The page title

Every page needs a title element, and it needs to be its own. The title is the headline a search engine shows and the label on a browser tab. A missing title gets replaced by the URL or by whatever text the engine picks. The same title on every page tells the engine that the pages are interchangeable. Fix: a distinct, specific title on each page, with the thing the page is about near the front.

2. The meta description

The description is the sentence or two under the headline in a search result. When it is missing, the engine picks a fragment of page text, which rarely sells the page. Fix: a description of 120 to 155 characters that says what the page offers and who it is for.

3. One top-level heading

A page should have exactly one top-level heading, and it should say what the page is. Content editors tend to add H1s because they are the biggest option in the menu, so pages end up with three or four. Pages built from templates sometimes end up with none. Fix: one H1 that matches the title, then H2 and H3 for the sections.

4. Heading levels that skip

Headings are an outline. An H2 followed by an H4 is a gap in the outline, and screen readers and search engines both read the structure, not the font size. Fix: step down one level at a time. If a heading is only there to look big, make it a styled paragraph instead.

5. The robots file and the sitemap

Two small files tell a search engine what it may crawl and what exists. A robots file that blocks the whole site, or a sitemap that points at pages that no longer exist, is a silent problem because nothing on the page looks wrong. Fix: confirm the robots file allows the pages you want found, and that the sitemap lists live pages only. The robots exclusion standard and the sitemap protocol are both short reads.

Conversion basics

6. A way to get in touch

Somewhere on the page there should be a phone number a phone can dial, an email address a mail client can open, a form or a booking link. A number pasted as an image, or a "Contact us" heading with nothing under it, fails this check. It is the single most expensive fault on the list, because every other improvement feeds a page that cannot convert. Fix: a clickable phone link, a mailto link or a form, on every page that is meant to produce an enquiry.

7. Images without alt text

Alt text describes an image for someone who cannot see it and for a search engine that cannot either. Galleries, logos and product shots arrive without it because the upload step does not insist. Fix: a short description on every image that carries meaning, and an empty alt attribute on the purely decorative ones.

Readability basics

8. Text contrast

Light grey text on white looks refined in a design review and disappears in sunlight on a phone. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines set a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for normal text, and most small business sites have at least one block of body copy under it, usually a caption, a footer or a form hint. Fix: darken the text or lighten the background until the ratio clears.

9. Overflow on a narrow screen

At 360 pixels wide, a common phone width, a page should fit. A wide table, a fixed-width image or an embedded map that was never given a maximum width pushes the whole page sideways, and the visitor gets a horizontal scrollbar and half a layout. Fix: find the element that is wider than the screen and give it a width of 100 percent or a scroll container of its own.

10. Tap targets that are too small

Links and buttons need to be big enough to hit with a thumb. WCAG 2.2 sets a floor of 24 by 24 pixels for a target, and menus built from small text links, icon rows and date pickers are the usual offenders. Fix: pad the links. Nothing about the design has to change except the hit area.

What else a public check looks at

These ten are the ones that come up on pages that look fine. A full check of the public pages also covers the viewport tag and whether it blocks zooming, the canonical link, Open Graph tags for sharing, structured data, leftover placeholder text, a video that autoplays with sound, review markup, form controls without a name and, in the security section of a report, whether any keys or credentials have ended up in public files.

Every one of these checks is deterministic. It reads the rendered page and reports what is there. That matters because the fix is only worth doing if the finding is real, and a check that guesses wastes the client's trust along with your time.

Run the ten before the client does

None of these checks need the site's login, which means a client, a competitor or a prospective customer can run them too. The useful thing is to run them first, every month, and put the findings in front of the client with the fix already in hand.

See what a website audit report finds on a real site. Get a free website audit: enter a URL and an email, and we check the public pages on our servers. We never log in and never touch your files.