Spare Saturday, Free Tools: How to Find Out Why Your Website Is Underperforming Before You Pay Anyone

Here's a truth nobody in the web design industry wants you to hear: a huge chunk of expensive website redesigns are just contractors fixing problems you could have found yourself with a checklist, a laptop, and one unhurried Saturday afternoon.

That's not a knock on agencies — good ones earn their fees. But if your site feels "off" and your gut says it's costing you customers, you don't need to start with a proposal and a deposit. You need to start with an audit. And an audit can cost you exactly zero dollars.

So grab a coffee, open your website, and let's play detective.

Start With Your Phone, Not Your Desktop

More than half of your visitors are probably seeing your site on a phone. Yet most small business owners only ever look at their own website from the laptop they built it on.

Pull out your actual phone — not a desktop browser shrunk down — and visit your site like a customer would. Then ask yourself:

• Can you read the text without pinching and zooming?
• Are the buttons big enough for a thumb, or do you keep tapping the wrong thing?
• Does the menu open, or does it fight you?
• How many seconds until the page shows something useful?

If you wince at any point, so do your customers. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool will confirm your suspicions with real numbers. Pop in your URL and look at the mobile score. Anything in the red is costing you visitors — Google has said for years that slow mobile pages lose rankings and, more importantly, patience.

Don't obsess over hitting a perfect 100. Just note the biggest complaints the tool gives you. Usually it's the same two or three culprits repeating across pages.

Hunt Down the Broken Stuff

Nothing screams "this business doesn't pay attention" like a 404 error. And here's the thing — broken links accumulate quietly. Someone deletes a page, a partner changes their URL, an old blog post points to a dead product. Nobody notices because nobody clicks every link on every page.

A free crawler like Screaming Frog (the free version handles up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites just fine) will click every link so you don't have to. Run it, filter for 404s, and fix what you find. Either update the link or redirect the dead page to the closest living one.

While you're in there, check the basics on every important page:

• Does every page have a title that describes it? Not "Home — Welcome" but something a stranger would actually search for?
• Any images missing alt text? (Screen readers need it, and so does Google.)
• Is your contact info — phone, address, hours — identical everywhere it appears, including your Google Business Profile?

That last one matters more than people think. Inconsistent business info across the web confuses both customers and search engines.

Put Your Images on a Diet

Here's a classic: someone uploads a photo straight off their phone — 8 megabytes, easy — and drops it on the homepage. It looks fine to them. But every visitor is now downloading a file the size of a small novel just to see a picture of the storefront.

Image bloat is the single most common reason small business sites are slow, and the fix is free. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and look for "Properly size images" or "Serve images in next-gen formats." Then, before uploading anything new, run it through a free compressor like Squoosh or TinyPNG. Same picture, a tenth of the file size, nobody can tell the difference.

Five minutes of image dieting often moves your speed score more than a month of hand-wringing about design.

The Navigation Test: Ask Someone Who Isn't You

You know your site too well. That's the problem.

Hand your phone to a friend or family member who's never used it and give them one task: "Find out what you charge and how to contact you." Then say nothing. Watch where they hesitate, where they backtrack, where they squint.

Every hesitation is a leak in your funnel. Common offenders:

• Menus with eight or nine options that should be four
• Pricing buried three clicks deep (or missing entirely, which forces people to email you — and many won't)
• A contact page that hides the phone number below a form nobody wants to fill out
• Jargon in the headline that describes what you do instead of what the customer gets

If your test subject asks, "Wait, what does this company actually do?" — that's not their failure. That's your homepage talking about itself instead of solving a problem.

Check What Google Already Knows

Before assuming nobody can find you, verify it. Search Google for the phrases a real customer would use — "plumber near me," "wedding caterer Austin," whatever fits your business. Are you there? Are your competitors?

Then open Google Search Console (free, and if you haven't set it up yet, that's your first to-do). It shows you exactly which searches bring people to your site and where you rank. You'll often discover you're ranking on page two for terms that could genuinely bring business — which tells you exactly where to focus before you spend a dime on anything else.

Turn Your Findings Into a Hit List

By now you should have a short, unglamorous list: slow mobile pages, a handful of broken links, three oversized images, a confusing menu, maybe a missing pricing page.

Here's the good news — most of that list is fixable in a weekend or two, by you or a freelancer charging a few hundred dollars, not an agency charging tens of thousands. Compress the images. Fix the links. Rewrite the headline so it leads with the customer's problem. Add your phone number to the top of the contact page.

Do that, wait a few weeks, and re-run the same checks. If your numbers improve and your test subject finds the pricing on the first try, congratulations — you just did a website audit for the low, low price of a Saturday.

And if, after all that, you still want a full redesign? At least you'll walk into that conversation knowing exactly what's broken and why. That's not just saving money. That's negotiating from strength.