The leak
It takes about three seconds, and nobody tells you.
Here is exactly how you lose somebody who was ready to buy from you.
They tap your link
Someone searches for what you do and taps through to your website. At this point you have already won the hard part.
They wait
And wait. This is the moment it goes wrong, and it takes about three seconds. On a phone, on mobile data, standing in a car park.
They go back to Google
Straight on to whoever loads faster — which is usually whoever is nearest you and no better at the job.
You never hear about it
No missed-call list. No voicemail. No note through the door. It just quietly does not happen, week after week.
The averages
Your site might beat these. It might be a great deal worse.
The only way to know is to measure it, which is what the audit is for.
Sources: HTTP Archive and Google mobile speed benchmarks; bounce-rate figures from Google's own research on mobile page speed.
What I actually check
Some of it is a scan. The rest is me, on a phone, being your customer.
How fast it really is
Measured on a phone on mobile data, not on a fast computer on office broadband. That difference is usually where the nasty surprise lives.
Whether it works on a phone
Text you can read without pinching, buttons you can hit with a thumb, nothing running off the side of the screen. Most local searches happen on a phone, usually while the person is standing up.
Whether anyone can reach you
I test your contact form and send a real message through it. I check your phone number is tappable and your address is right. A surprising number of forms have quietly been going nowhere for months.
Whether Google can find you
Your Google Business Profile, your opening hours, your reviews, and whether you turn up in the map results when somebody nearby searches for what you do. For a local business this is often worth more than the website itself.
Whether the proof is where the doubt is
Qualifications, insurance, reviews and real photographs of you doing the work — are they at the top where somebody is already looking for a reason to say no, or three scrolls down where nobody reaches?
What I won't do
I will not invent a number.
You have probably had the email
“Your website is losing you £47,000 a year.” Nobody who has never seen your books can possibly know that, and you were right to bin it.
You tell me three things you already know
Roughly how many enquiries you get in a week, what an average customer is worth to you, and roughly how many of those enquiries you win. Put those next to what I measured and you get a sensible worst case and best case.
And if your website is fine?
If it is doing its job and the problem is somewhere else entirely, I will tell you that and we are done.