Most broken websites have four cheap problems. You do not need to pay anybody to find them.

Two honest notes before the list. First, this is a surface check. We ask your page for its HTML, time how long that took, and look at what came back. It is not a full audit and we will not pretend otherwise. Second, plenty of businesses doing perfectly well score badly here, because nobody ever set the basics up. That is a cheap problem, which is rather the point of showing you.

The four that cost you money today

1. Does the page answer at all, and how fast

   We time how long the server takes to send the first byte. Under 800 milliseconds is the target. Above about a second and a half, people start leaving before they have seen anything, and Google notices too. The cause is almost always hosting rather than your site, which makes it one of the cheapest things on this list to fix.

2. Is it served over HTTPS

   If not, browsers put Not Secure next to your address. Nobody fills in a form under that label. A certificate is free and setting one up is an afternoon at most.

3. Is there a viewport tag

   This is the single line that lets a layout adapt to a phone screen. Without it, a phone renders your site as a shrunken desktop page and everybody pinches to zoom. Given that most visitors are on a phone, this is not a small thing.

4. Is there a page title, and is it the right length

   The title is the blue line in Google's results. No title means you are effectively invisible. Between fifteen and sixty characters reads best before it gets cut off. This is a five-minute fix and it changes how many people click.

The four that cost you slowly

1. Meta description

   The grey sentence under the blue line. If you do not write one, Google writes its own, and it rarely picks the sentence you would have chosen. It does not affect ranking. It affects whether anybody clicks.

2. Exactly one main heading

   One H1 per page. None, and nothing on the page announces what it is about. Several, and the signal is muddied. This is a tidying job, not a rebuild.

3. Alt text on images

   The written description behind a picture. It is what a screen reader says out loud and what Google Images reads. Missing alt text is an accessibility problem before it is a search one.

4. A social sharing image

   Without an og:image, pasting your link into WhatsApp or LinkedIn shows a bare grey line of text. With one, it shows a picture. People share what looks shareable.

The four small ones

• Page weight. How many kilobytes of HTML arrive before a single image starts loading. Very heavy pages are usually a page builder doing too much. On mobile data it costs real seconds.
• A declared language. One attribute. It affects screen readers and automatic translation.
• A favicon. The little icon in the browser tab. Cosmetic, but a blank one looks unfinished, and people notice unfinished.
• Whether images load at all, or arrive later by script. Content that only appears after JavaScript runs is harder for search engines and slower for everyone.

What this will not tell you

It will not tell you whether your writing is any good, whether the site is aimed at the right people, or whether the enquiry form goes somewhere a human reads. Those are the three things that most often cost a business real enquiries, and no automated check finds them. That is what a person looking at it properly is for.