Most of what we take on is not a blank page. It is a site somebody else built, usually working fine, usually leaking somewhere. The same problems turn up again and again, and most of them are not hard to fix once you know to look.
1. Images shipped at full camera resolution
The single most common cause of a slow site. A hero image straight from a phone can be several megabytes, scaled down in the browser so it looks fine while costing every visitor the full download. Correctly sized images, modern formats, and lazy loading below the fold routinely cut page weight by more than half. It is the cheapest performance work there is.
2. No one has looked at it on a phone recently
Not “is it responsive” — it usually is. The question is whether anyone has actually used it on a phone since launch. Tap targets too close together, a sticky header eating a third of the screen, a form where the keyboard covers the submit button. These are use problems, not layout problems, and they only show up if you hold the thing in your hand.
3. The contact form goes nowhere
We find this more often than anyone would like. The form submits, the visitor sees a thank-you message, and the notification lands in a spam folder or an inbox nobody reads. Test it monthly, and send submissions somewhere with a paper trail rather than a single person’s email.
4. Page titles that all say the same thing
Every page titled with the company name, or worse, “Home”. The title tag is what a search result shows and what a browser tab says. Writing a distinct, descriptive title for each page is an afternoon of work that pays back indefinitely.
5. Nobody can edit it
This is the expensive one, and the only one that is not quick. Content hardcoded into templates, so changing a phone number means editing a file. Every trivial update becomes a support request, so updates stop happening and the site goes stale. Fixing it properly means restructuring how content is stored, which is real work — but it is the difference between a site you own and a site you rent from whoever built it.
If you want a rough sense of where your own site stands, work down that list in order. The first four are an afternoon each.
