Your website looks fine on your laptop. Here is what your customers are actually seeing.

Over the last two years I have looked under the bonnet of a lot of business websites around Kolkata and Burdwan — schools, hotels, clinics, retailers. A pattern comes up often enough to be worth writing down.

The owner is not unhappy. The site exists, it has their logo on it, and it looks perfectly acceptable on the laptop in their office. What they do not know is that on a phone, on a normal mobile connection, that same site takes eleven seconds to appear, the enquiry form has been sending mail into a dead inbox since 2022, and Google has never indexed half of it.

Nobody tells them, because customers who leave do not send feedback. They just leave.

Here are the checks I run first. You can do every one of them yourself, today, without a developer and without spending anything.

1. Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data

Not on office WiFi. Turn WiFi off. This is the connection most of your customers are on.

Count the seconds until you can read something. Three seconds is fine. Over five and you are losing people before they have seen a word about your business. Then try to actually use it: tap the phone number, tap the menu, fill in the enquiry form. If your thumb misses buttons, or you have to pinch to zoom to read anything, that is not a small annoyance — that is the majority of your traffic having a bad time.

2. Run PageSpeed Insights

Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your address, and look only at the Mobile score.

Above 90 is good. 50 to 89 means there is real work to do but the site is functional. Under 50 means the site is actively working against you — and it is worth knowing that Google uses these measurements as a ranking factor, so a slow site is both losing the visitors it gets and getting fewer of them.

Most page-builder sites I test land between 25 and 45 on mobile. That is not the builder being used badly. That is what happens when a page ships a megabyte and a half of code so that a designer could drag a box.

3. Send yourself an enquiry through your own form

This one catches more dead sites than anything else on the list, and it takes ninety seconds.

Fill in your own contact form as if you were a customer. Use a real message. Then wait, and check: did anything arrive? Check spam too.

Forms break silently and constantly. The email address they were pointed at belonged to a staff member who left. The hosting company changed how mail is sent. A plugin updated. The form still shows a cheerful “thank you, we will be in touch” to every customer who fills it in, and nothing has arrived at your end for a year and a half. I have found exactly this on a hotel site that was still paying for ads driving traffic to that form.

4. Check the padlock, and check the date on it

Look at the address bar. If there is no padlock, or a “Not secure” warning, your visitors are being told by their browser not to trust you — and if you take any kind of booking or payment, that is serious.

SSL certificates also expire. A lapsed one throws a full-page red warning that most people will never click past. Certificates renew automatically on decent hosting; if yours does not, someone has to remember, and eventually nobody does.

5. Search for your own business name on Google

Search your business name plus your town. Then search for what you actually sell — “school admission Katwa”, “hotel near Burdwan”, whatever applies.

If you do not appear for your own name, something is badly wrong: often the site is set to discourage search engines, a setting that gets switched on during development and never switched off. If you appear for your name but nowhere for what you sell, the site was built as a brochure rather than as something meant to be found.

While you are there, check your Google Business Profile. Wrong phone number, old address and outdated timings on that panel cost more enquiries than most website problems do, and fixing it is free.

6. Ask yourself who owns the domain

This is the one that turns a bad website into an expensive hostage situation.

Do you have the login for the domain registrar? Do you have the hosting account? Is the domain registered in your business name, or in your developer’s?

If a developer registered your domain on their own account, they own your web address. Not the website — the address itself, the thing printed on your signboard and your rate card. I have watched businesses pay several times what a rebuild would have cost simply to get their own name released, and I have watched others give up and change their web address, which throws away every year of search ranking they had built.

Ask for the registrar login today, while the relationship is fine. A developer who will not hand it over has told you something important.

7. Look at when it was last touched

Copyright notice still saying 2021. Prices that changed last year. Staff who left. A “latest news” section whose latest news is three years old.

Visitors read all of this as a signal about your business, not about your website. An out-of-date site suggests an out-of-date operation, and it makes people wonder whether you are still trading at all.

What to do with what you find

If you failed one or two of these, they are usually fixable in an afternoon and you do not need a new website. Fix the form, renew the certificate, update the year, claim your domain.

If you failed five or more, you have not got a website with problems — you have got a brochure that happens to be online, and the money spent on it has already gone. The honest advice at that point is to stop paying to maintain it and rebuild properly, because every month it stays up is a month of enquiries going to whoever ranks above you.

Either way, run the checks. Twenty minutes of your own time will tell you more about your website than any developer’s report will.