I built a free website audit tool last week. It checks page speed, SEO, mobile performance, and a few other things that matter if you want customers to actually find you online.
To test it properly, I ran it against 10 real business websites in Reading. Estate agents, restaurants, bars, tradespeople, salons. A decent cross-section of the kind of businesses that depend on their website to bring in customers.
I am not going to name any of them. This is not about shaming anyone. It is about the patterns, because the same problems came up again and again.
The numbers
Here is what the tool found across all 10 sites:
The average mobile performance score was 63 out of 100. The average desktop score was 83. That gap matters, because most people searching for a local business are doing it on their phone.
8 out of 10 sites took longer than 3 seconds to fully load on mobile. Google’s own research says 53% of visitors leave if a page takes longer than 3 seconds. Three of the sites took over 10 seconds.
The slowest site took 21.6 seconds to load on mobile. That is not a typo. Twenty-one seconds. Someone searching for a restaurant on their phone would have given up, found a competitor, and ordered a starter before that page finished loading.
Only 3 out of 10 scored above 90 on mobile. Those three were all tradespeople with simple, lightweight sites. The businesses with the fanciest-looking websites were consistently the slowest.
What kept going wrong
Unused code was the single biggest problem. 9 out of 10 sites were loading JavaScript and CSS files that were not being used on the page. One site was loading 2.6MB of JavaScript it did not need. Another had 900KB of unused CSS. This is the digital equivalent of making every customer carry a rucksack full of bricks through your front door before they can sit down.
Mobile was an afterthought. Every single site performed worse on mobile than on desktop. Some dramatically so. One scored 99 on desktop and 37 on mobile. If your web developer tested your site on a laptop and said “looks great”, they only did half the job.
Basic SEO was missing. 3 out of 10 had no H1 heading tag, which is the most fundamental signal to Google about what your page is about. One site had no page title, no meta description, and no H1 at all. Google literally does not know what that business does. Another had a meta description that was just 29 characters long when it should be 150-160.
Social sharing was broken. 4 out of 10 were missing Open Graph tags. That means when someone shares a link to the business on Facebook, WhatsApp, or LinkedIn, no preview image or description appears. The link just looks like a bare URL. People scroll past those.
One site had a spelling error in its meta description. “Emergancy” instead of “emergency”. This shows up in Google search results. First impressions matter.
Why this happens
None of these are bad businesses. They are estate agents selling houses, restaurants serving food, electricians wiring kitchens. They are good at what they do. They just do not know their website is working against them, because nobody has told them.
Most of these sites were built by agencies or freelancers who delivered something that looked nice on a big screen, collected payment, and moved on. The business owner looked at it on their laptop, said “that looks great”, and never checked it on their phone. Nobody ran a speed test. Nobody checked the SEO basics.
The frustrating thing is that most of these fixes are not complicated. Removing unused code, adding a proper H1 tag, writing a decent meta description, compressing images. A competent developer could fix the worst of these issues in a day.
What this means for your business
If you run a business in Reading (or anywhere else) and your website loads slowly on a phone, you are losing customers. Not theoretically. Actually. Every day.
Google uses mobile performance as a ranking factor. A slow mobile site means you show up lower in search results, which means fewer people find you, which means fewer customers walk through your door.
The businesses in my sample that had fast, well-optimised sites were all tradespeople. Simple sites, built lean, loading fast. They are not spending more money on their web presence. They are spending less. And they are getting better results because their sites actually work.
Try it yourself
I have made the audit tool free and public. Enter your URL, get a report in your inbox in a few minutes. No sales call, no obligation. Just data about how your site is performing and what you could fix.
If the results worry you and you want someone to walk through them with you, I am happy to do that too. But the report is yours either way.