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A 10-minute website check before your next client call: a free checklist for marketing agencies
If you run ads, SEO or social media for small businesses, sooner or later the client asks: “And what about our website?” Here is the ten-minute routine we use ourselves before talking to an owner, with free tools only — and the plain words that work when explaining the results.
Why bother if you only run the ads
Your campaign sends traffic to a page you do not control. If that page is slow, flagged as unsafe, or broken on a phone, the client sees a poor return on ad spend — and blames the campaign. Ten minutes of checking up front gives you two things: a fair baseline, and a useful conversation that is not about your fee.
1. Mobile speed (2 minutes)
Run the landing page through Google PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile tab only. Ignore the overall score at first; look at Largest Contentful Paint. Above about 4 seconds, a part of every paid click is wasted before the page even appears. The usual causes are uncompressed images, heavy themes and too many third-party scripts.
How to say it to the owner: “Some visitors leave before the page even loads — and we pay for those clicks either way.”
2. HTTPS and basic security headers (1 minute)
Open the site with http:// and check that it redirects to https://. Then look at the response headers (browser developer tools → Network) for Strict-Transport-Security. Its absence is not an emergency, but in our study of 71 clinic websites, 80% were missing it — it is a quick, cheap fix that a developer can add in minutes.
3. Email spoofing protection (1 minute)
Look up two DNS records: the SPF record on the domain, and the TXT record at _dmarc.domain. What matters is the DMARC policy: p=none only monitors, while p=quarantine or p=reject actually stops fake emails. This is the finding owners understand fastest — “anyone can send an invoice to your customers in your name” needs no technical explanation.
One warning: before anyone switches DMARC to quarantine, list every service that sends email as the client — contact form, newsletter tool, CRM, invoicing. Otherwise their own emails start landing in spam.
4. Outdated platform and plugins (2 minutes)
View the page source and search for “generator”, “ver=” and “jquery”. A WordPress version or a jQuery 1.x file visible in the code is a sign nobody has updated the site in a while. Do not quote exact vulnerabilities from a version number alone — version detection is a heuristic. The honest question to the client is simply: “When were the platform and plugins last updated, and is there a backup?”
5. Basic accessibility (2 minutes)
Run the WAVE browser extension on the home page and the main landing page. Look at two things only: images with no text alternative, and form fields with no label. Since June 2025, the European Accessibility Act applies to many online shops and services in the EU (micro-enterprises providing services are exempt), so this is no longer only a “nice to have” for clients selling to EU consumers.
Avoid the fear angle. Telling a small business it “will be sued” is rarely true and damages trust. “Some of your customers cannot use this page” is both accurate and persuasive.
6. Can search engines and AI assistants read it? (1 minute)
Open domain/robots.txt. Check that it does not accidentally block everything (Disallow: /), and see whether it blocks AI crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot. Blocking them is a legitimate choice — but it should be a choice, not a leftover from a template. Then check that the page has a title and a meta description that a human would click.
Turning the checks into a one-page summary
Owners do not want six reports. We found that a simple traffic light per item works best, followed by only three actions in priority order: what to fix this week, this month, and when the site is next rebuilt. Anything you cannot verify, say so — a short “we could not check this” builds more trust than a confident guess.
If you do this for every new client, you will also notice patterns across your whole portfolio. That is useful material for your own case studies and newsletters.
Written by Bohdan Khomyn, OLBO web studio, Lviv. We automated these checks for ourselves in the free OLBO Website Checker, but every step above works with free tools you already have.