Three checks on your own website

Nobody clicks their own menu. You built the site, or you paid someone to build it, and since then you have gone straight to the page you need. A first-time visitor does the opposite. They land on whichever page the search handed them, and the menu is the only way they have of reaching anything else.

Here are three checks you can run on your own site. Two of them take about five minutes. The third takes two minutes to start, and you read the result the next morning. Two of them need no tools, no login and no password. You do not need to know how the site was built.

Check one: click every link in your top navigation

Open your home page. Click the first item in the menu. Go back. Click the second. Keep going until you have clicked all of them, including anything inside a dropdown, and any button that sends people to a booking page. Then do it again on your phone, using the menu icon. The phone menu is often built separately from the desktop one, so it can break on its own.

A bad result looks like a page that says "404", a page that is blank, or a link that lands somewhere you did not know existed.

What it means. Something changed and the menu did not follow. A page was renamed, a plugin was updated, or a draft was published over a live page. It very rarely means the site needs rebuilding. A broken menu link is usually one line of configuration.

What you can ignore. A menu item that appears to do nothing when you are already on that page. A page that is slow the first time and quick the second time, which is often a cache filling up.

Check two: email every address printed on your site

Use your phone, and use a personal address that is not on your own domain. A message sent from your own mailbox to your own mailbox does not travel the same path as one from a customer.

Find every address printed on the site. The contact page, the footer, a team page, and the reply address on a booking form if it shows one. Send each one two words. "Test, ignore." Then read the result the next morning.

Some templates ship with a placeholder address in the footer or on a contact form. Check every address printed on the site, including any you did not write.

A bad result is a message that bounces, a message that never arrives, or a message that arrives in the spam folder.

What it means. A bounce means the address printed on your site does not exist, so anything sent to it has not arrived. Silence usually means the mailbox exists but nobody opens it, or it belongs to someone who has left. Spam usually points at your domain's mail settings rather than your website. If nothing arrives at all, the free MX Lookup at mxtoolbox.com will show you where mail for your domain is actually delivered.

What you can ignore. A delay of a few minutes. Your name showing up oddly on the received message.

Check three: open your site in a private window

Open a private window. In Chrome it is Ctrl+Shift+N on Windows and Cmd+Shift+N on a Mac. In Firefox it is Ctrl+Shift+P and Cmd+Shift+P. In Safari it is Cmd+Shift+N, or File then New Private Window. Make sure you are signed out of everything. Type your full address, ending and all, rather than clicking a bookmark.

Now read your home page as though you had never seen it.

A private window carries none of your cookies and none of your logins, so anything you dismissed months ago is back. A cookie banner sitting on top of the phone number. A chat widget nobody is watching. An announcement bar about a public holiday that has already passed. A price you thought you had removed. A "staging" or "coming soon" notice on one page. Check that the address works both with and without the www.

A bad result worth acting on this week is a browser warning about the connection. That is Not secure in the address bar, or a full page saying Your connection is not private. Chrome no longer shows a padlock, so the absence of one means nothing on its own. It is the only fault on this list a customer can read without help. Not secure usually means the page arrived without encryption. The full-page warning usually means the certificate has expired, or does not cover the address you typed. Certificates carry an end date, and they renew automatically right up until the day they do not. If your site is on Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or GoDaddy's builder, your host issues and renews the certificate. A warning there is a question for their support, not something you install yourself. The look still takes ten seconds.

What you can ignore. Fonts arriving a beat after the text. The layout shifting once while the page settles. Both are worth tidying at some point. Neither belongs on this week's list.

What these checks do not tell you

They show you what a visitor sees. That is all they show you.

They do not tell you whether your backups work. That takes a restore you run on purpose. They do not tell you who holds the licence for your domain name, or whether that person still answers email. They do not tell you whether your Google Business Profile matches your site. Check the phone number and the hours there separately. In a local search, that profile can appear above your website.

They also do not tell you that anything bad has happened. A broken link is a broken link. Resist reading more into it than what you saw.

What to do next

Write down what you found. One line each: the page address, what you saw, and today's date. Give that list to whoever maintains the site. It is more useful than "the website is not working properly".

If an item on the list cannot be explained, that is worth an hour of somebody's time. It is rarely a rebuild. If somebody tells you it is, there are checks worth running before you agree. These three are the ones we would run first on any site. You can run them today without us. If you would rather not, that is the kind of work we take on.