contractor website audit
Mid-Year Website Check: Is Your Site Actually Bringing You Work?
It is July. Half of 2026 is on the books, and if someone asked you right now how many jobs your website brought in since January, could you answer? Most contractors cannot, and it is not their fault. Nobody ever showed them what to check. This is a 20-minute contractor website audit you can run yourself, with pass and fail numbers for each test instead of vague advice.
You need three things: your phone, access to your Google Business Profile, and honesty about what you find. No tools to buy.
The five numbers that tell you the truth
Before the individual tests, here is the scorecard. Pull these five numbers and you will know more about your website than most owners ever do.
| What to check | Where to find it | Healthy | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads per month from the site | Form emails + GBP call clicks | Steady and known | You have no idea |
| Mobile load time | Open your site on cellular data | Under 3 seconds | You are still waiting at 5+ |
| Google Business Profile actions | GBP dashboard, calls + directions + clicks | Flat or growing vs. last year | Sliding for 3+ months |
| New reviews in the last 90 days | Your Google listing | 2 or more | Zero since winter |
| Core Web Vitals | Google Search Console, free | Pages rated 'good' | 'Poor' or no data at all |
Test one: does it load before your customer gives up?
Stand in your driveway, turn off wifi, and open your own website. Count the seconds. The average mobile page load is a painful 8.6 seconds, while desktop averages 2.5, and about 53% of mobile visitors leave if a page takes more than 3 seconds. The probability of a bounce rises 32% as load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. Your customer is on that same phone, on that same signal, and they have less patience for your website than you do.
For the formal version of this test, check Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console. Only around 42% of mobile sites pass all three metrics, so passing puts you ahead of most competitors on a genuine ranking factor. If your site fails, our speed and hosting service exists for exactly this.
Test two: fill out your own form
Submit a test request through your own contact form, then watch your inbox. This test fails more often than any other, and it fails silently. A form breaks after some update, visitors keep submitting, and every lead evaporates until a customer happens to mention they never heard back. We have seen sites where the form had been quietly broken for months. If your test email does not arrive within a few minutes, you may have found where this year's missing leads went. Our post on why websites get no calls covers the other usual suspects.
Test three: search like a stranger
Open an incognito browser window and search your trade plus your town, the way a homeowner would. Not your business name, your trade. Where are you? The map results at the top, the local 3-pack, capture around 42% of clicks on local-intent searches, and businesses in it get dramatically more calls and direction requests than everyone below. If competitors fill that box and you are on page two, that is not a website problem, it is a local SEO problem, and it is fixable.
Test four: when was your last review?
Look at your Google listing and find the date of your most recent review. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and the share who say they always read them jumped from 29% to 41% in a single year. Expectations rose with it: more customers now filter for 4.5 stars and up, and they check whether reviews are recent. A wall of great reviews from 2024 reads as a business that peaked in 2024.
If you finished jobs this spring and got zero reviews from them, the fix is a habit, not a budget. Ask at the moment of the final walkthrough, when the customer is happiest. Our guide on getting more Google reviews has the exact scripts.
What a failing check actually costs
Fix things in this order
- Broken form or wrong phone number first. This is bleeding, not leaking.
- Speed second, because it multiplies everything else you fix.
- Google Business Profile completeness and a review-request habit third.
- Content gaps last: service pages and town pages that catch more searches.
Twenty minutes, five numbers, and you know exactly where you stand going into the second half of the year. Want the speed and mobile checks run for you automatically? The free Website Grader grades your site A to F in seconds, and the Website Scorecard covers the rest in ten questions. If you would rather have a professional set of eyes on it, we do a free website review, no strings attached: we tell you what is broken and what it would cost to fix, and you decide from there.
Sevastian Usenko
Founder, Seva Web Studio
Sevastian founded Seva Web Studio after watching skilled contractors lose work to people who were simply easier to find online. He writes about strategy, getting found, and running an honest web studio for local trades.
