Before you spend $5,000 on an agency, spend 90 minutes on yourself. Most websites have problems the owner can spot in an afternoon — slow pages, broken forms, dead analytics, mobile layouts that fall apart on an iPhone. You don’t need a developer to find them. You need a checklist and a stopwatch.
Here’s the 6-section self-audit we hand to Bergen County business owners who call us. Run it first. You’ll either fix 30% of the problems yourself, or you’ll show up to the discovery call with a list — which makes the next conversation 10x more useful than “our site feels off.”
Section 1: Performance audit (10 min)
Open pagespeed.web.dev. Run your homepage plus your two highest-traffic pages (check Google Analytics if you’re not sure). Run each on Mobile, not Desktop — that’s what Google indexes.
Write down: the Performance score, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for each page.
Red flags: Performance under 70. LCP over 2.5 seconds. CLS over 0.1. Any “Opportunity” worth more than 1 second of savings. If your homepage scores 45 on mobile, you’re losing roughly half your visitors before the page even paints.
Section 2: Content + conversion audit (15 min)
Open your homepage in a private window. Read it as a stranger who’s never heard of you. Set a 5-second timer — can you tell what you do, who it’s for, and what to click next? If not, your homepage isn’t working.
Red flags: No clear headline. No primary call-to-action above the fold. Three “Learn More” buttons that all go to the same page. Stock photos that could be on any agency site. A hero that talks about you instead of the customer. Phone number buried in the footer.
Section 3: Form audit (10 min)
Open an incognito window. Submit every form on the site — contact, quote request, newsletter, lead magnet. Use a real email. Wait. Did you get the autoresponder? Did the lead land in your inbox? Did it tag correctly in your CRM?
Red flags: Silent submission with no thank-you message. No autoresponder. Lead goes to a deactivated email address. Form errors that don’t tell the user what’s wrong. Required fields that aren’t actually required. We’ve seen Bergen County businesses lose 6 months of leads to a broken Gravity Forms notification — and never know.
Section 4: Mobile audit (15 min)
Pick up your phone. Open every page on your main navigation. Don’t use Chrome DevTools — use an actual phone, ideally not the one you used to build the site.
Red flags: Buttons too small to tap. Text overlapping images. Forms that zoom on focus and won’t zoom back. Hero images that crop the headline off-screen. Sticky headers that eat half the viewport. Hamburger menus that don’t close. Phone numbers that aren’t tappable. Mobile is 60%+ of B2B traffic now — if it’s broken there, it’s broken everywhere that matters.
Section 5: Analytics audit (15 min)
Open Google Analytics 4. Check the five numbers that matter: sessions (last 30 days vs prior 30), engagement rate, top landing pages, conversion events, and traffic sources.
Red flags: No conversion events configured (so you have no idea what’s working). Direct traffic over 40% (usually means UTM tracking is broken). Engagement rate under 40%. A top landing page that isn’t your homepage and isn’t optimized for conversion. Zero data in Search Console because nobody verified the property. If GA4 wasn’t migrated properly in 2023, you may be looking at empty dashboards and not realize it.
Section 6: SEO audit (10 min)
Google your business name. Then Google “[your service] [your city]” — for us that’d be “web design Bergen County.” Open an incognito window so personalization doesn’t skew the results.
Red flags: Your Google Business Profile doesn’t show up first for your own name. No reviews, or reviews from 2019. Competitor sites rank for your service + city and yours doesn’t appear on page 1. Your meta description in the search result is auto-generated gibberish or the WordPress default. Schema markup missing (test at search.google.com/test/rich-results).
What to do with what you find
Roughly 30% of what you wrote down, you can fix yourself this weekend. Broken form notifications, missing meta descriptions, dead analytics events, a hero CTA swap, compressing the 4MB image on the homepage — these are 20-minute fixes, not agency projects.
The other 70% — Core Web Vitals, conversion rate optimization, structural SEO, real mobile rebuilds — that’s where an agency earns its fee. But now you arrive with a list: “homepage LCP is 4.8s, contact form hasn’t notified in 3 weeks, mobile menu broken on iPhone, we don’t rank for our main service in our own county.” That’s a 20-minute scoping call instead of a 90-minute discovery session.
How AJD handles this
Whether you work with us or not, we’d rather you run this audit first. When Bergen County clients show up with a specific list, we quote sharper, scope tighter, and ship faster. Vague “make it better” projects cost more and take longer — that’s not us being slick, that’s just how scope works.
If you run the 90-minute audit and want a second set of eyes on what you found, that’s exactly what our free discovery call is for. Bring your list. We’ll tell you what’s a weekend fix and what isn’t.
Ran the audit and want a second opinion? Send us your list. We’ll tell you which items are quick fixes you can ship yourself, and which ones actually need help.
