Website analysis: how to check whether your site brings in customers

You have a website. It’s online, the address is correct, and yet it stays quiet. Before you order a new site or buy an expensive tool, a down-to-earth website analysis is enough: what should the site do, does it do that, and where do visitors drop off?

Hieronder staat wat je zelf kunt nakijken. Het zijn controles die een webbouwer ook als eerste doet. Daarna weet je of je een tekst moet aanpassen, of dat de site technisch vastloopt.

What a website analysis is and isn’t

Een analyse beantwoordt drie vragen. Is de site bereikbaar en bruikbaar? Vindt Google hem? Doet een bezoeker daarna wat jij wilt: bellen, een formulier sturen, een afspraak maken?

It’s not a ranking with a hundred scores, and it’s not a promise that you’ll be in first place next month. A slow site with the right text sometimes gets more enquiries than a fast site where nobody understands what you sell.

Start with the goal, not the score

Write one sentence: what should a visitor do? For a plumber, that’s calling. For an SME, that’s often requesting a quote. For an online store, that’s placing an order.

Then open your homepage on your phone and read only the first screen-filling block. Does it say what you do, for whom, and what the next step is? If a stranger doesn’t understand that within ten seconds, the site already fails before there’s even a technical problem.

Examples by trade can be found at webdesign in Antwerp. Use them for comparison, not as a template.

Technology: accessible, secure, fast

Type your address into the browser, with and without www. You should end up on the same site, with a padlock in the address bar.

If you get an error, a white screen, or a message that the site isn’t accessible, then analyzing the text is pointless. The most common causes are listed in website not accessible.

Then the speed. Open the site on mobile data, not just on office Wi‑Fi. If the homepage takes a long time, or blocks jump around while the page loads, people drop off before they’ve read anything. Ten causes are listed in Make WordPress faster.

Also check whether the site is being updated. What you do preventively is covered under website security. What you do when it has already gone wrong is covered in website hacked.

Mobile and readability

View the site on a phone, not only on a large screen. Moonbeetle does not publish visitor percentages here. The test is concrete.

• Do you have to scroll horizontally to read a sentence? Then the layout is broken.
• Are buttons big enough to tap with a thumb?
• Is the phone number clickable?
• Can the menu be expanded, or is the navigation overlapping the text?

Contrast, font size, and a logical order are covered under making a website accessible.

Are you being found, or only visited via a direct link?

Search Google for your company name, in quotation marks. Then add a sentence a customer would type, for example your service plus your city.

Does only your homepage appear, and not a service page? Then the site is a business card. Practical steps are in rank higher in Google. If you work locally, your listing belongs with that: local SEO in Belgium and optimizing your Google Business Profile.

Check whether the name, address and phone number are the same as on the site. Three spellings are three businesses to Google.

The page itself: text, trust, contact

• Is the offer described in your words, not in a slogan that fits any business?
• Is there a photo of the work or the team, or only a stock photo?
• Are opening hours, address and VAT number up to date?
• Does the form work? Send a test message yourself and see whether it arrives, including in spam.
• Is it clear what happens after sending?

If you recognize multiple points, then the question isn’t only “how do I get more visitors”. That distinction is covered in 7 signs that your website is driving customers away.

What you can note down yourself in an hour

• Homepage on phone: clear or not.
• Padlock, loading time, updates.
• Search for your service plus your city.
• Google Business Profile: same name, address, phone number.
• Form: did the test email arrive or not.

What you can’t check yourself is usually the part under the hood. A move is covered separately in move your website to other hosting.

When you have the analysis done

Looking yourself is enough if the site is young and you mainly want to tighten up the text. Have someone take a look if the site has been around for years, if you don’t know why it’s slow, or if you have visitors but no inquiries.

A one-time check is different from maintenance. What belongs in that is covered in website maintenance. The choice between updating and rebuilding is linked to what a professional website costs. Webmaster support covers the technical side. SEO advice covers findability once the technical side is already in order.

Website analysis summary

Analyzing a website isn’t a mystery. You check whether it’s online, whether a phone can handle it, whether Google shows the right page, and whether a visitor knows what the next step is. Write down what fails. Fix the small things yourself. Get help for the rest.