Is Your Website Actually Healthy? Run a 30-Minute Site Wellness Check

Let’s do a quick, honest website wellness check. No agency, no tools you’ve never heard of. Just you, 30 minutes, and a simple lens: speed, clarity, navigation, trust, and tracking. You’re not crazy if things feel messy. The web moved under your feet, and most teams are overloaded, not behind. 

Website Health 101: What “Good” Looks Like (In Plain English)

Before you “fix” anything, get a baseline. Think of this as a fast, honest wellness exam for your site. Occasionally uncomfortable, absolutely necessary.

The exam centers on five areas:

Step 1 (5–10 min): Run a Website Speed & Core Web Vitals Triage

Open your homepage, your top product/solution page, pricing, and your main form page on a typical laptop and phone. Ask: Does it feel snappy? Are elements jumping around while loading? If it feels sluggish to you, it’s costing you money. Heavy scripts, sloppy embeds, and old tags are the usual suspects.

Then, quickly sanity-check indexation/sitemap/schema: Is the sitemap clean, not stuffed with junk? Are you using basic, structured data (Organization, Product/Service, Article/FAQ) so machines can get context quickly? You don’t have to be a search engineer, just make your content legible.

Step 2 (5–7 min): Navigation & Information Architecture—Eight-Second Test

Pretend you’ve never seen your site. Using only the homepage and main nav, can you answer: What do you do? Who is it for? What should I do next? If it’s not obvious in eight seconds, you’re overcomplicating things. Bloated menus and internal language are quiet conversion killers.

Step 3 (5–7 min): Homepage & Product Page Clarity—Kill the Jargon

Read your hero as if you didn’t write it. Is the value prop crisp? Are you asking for too much before trust (long forms, forced calls, gating everything)? Add visible proof—logos, testimonials, case studies, certifications—and fix cracks like broken links and mismatched styles.

Step 4 (3–5 min): Trust Signals Where They Matter

On high-intent pages (pricing, demo, contact), put recognizable logos/testimonials near the CTA. Keep forms to essential fields. Make one clear ask (“Book a Demo,” not “Submit”). These tiny moves reduce friction immediately.

Step 5 (5 min): Analytics & Tracking Sanity Check

Open your analytics. Can you reliably see which pages and paths drive demos, trials, or qualified leads, without a forensic investigation? If not, you don’t have a tech problem; you have a visibility problem. Fix this early, or every “strategy” is guesswork with better fonts.

Quick Fixes You Can Make This Week 

• Compress/resize images, enable caching/minification, kill abandoned scripts and broken redirects. Direct outcome: faster key pages, fewer friction signals.
  
  
• Simplify nav labels to match how buyers think. Tighten hero to one promise + one action. Reduce form fields. Add proof near CTAs. Standardize CTA labels.
  
  
• Do a light content refresh around 3–5 keyword clusters tied to who you are, what you sell, and who you serve. Align headings/metadata accordingly. This is about clarity and intent, not keyword stuffing.
  
  
• Sanity-check your external listings (LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, G2/Capterra) and link them to intentional landing pages, not the homepage. Keep descriptions consistent.
  
  

Prioritize Like a Product Team

Don’t launch ten workstreams and burn out. Map your backlog by impact (on conversions, qualified pipeline, task completion) and effort (design/dev/content/approvals/integrations/risk). Then place items in one of four quadrants: quick wins, strategic projects, cleanups, and avoid/defer. The diagram isn’t the magic; the discipline is.

Examples:

• Quick Wins (Do now): Fix broken/confusing CTAs, tighten hero copy, add trust near CTAs, compress images, and add missing meta on top URLs.
  
  
• Strategic Projects (Plan for 60–90 days): Re-architect nav/IA, replatform templates/CMS, build structured content model, redesign core product pages, stand up experimentation.
  
  
• Cleanups (Batch monthly): Typos on low-traffic pages, icon swaps, spacing polish, stale internal links on rarely visited posts.
  
  
• Avoid/Defer (Protect your team): Fancy animations on low-intent pages, rewriting dead archives without a strategy, over-engineering personalization before basics are clear, and complex edge-case integrations.

Turn that matrix into a simple roadmap: next 30 days (Quick Wins), next 60–90 (Strategic Projects), ongoing maintenance (Cleanups), and a parked list so zombie ideas stop hijacking meetings.

Scoring Your Site Health (Optional but Handy)

Give each area a score of 1–5.  Average them for an honest score:

• 4.0–5.0 strong; 
• 3.0–3.9 functional but leaving money on the table; 
• 2.0–2.9 reactive; 
• <2.0 is risk territory. The point isn’t shame—it’s clarity.