None of these websites had been abandoned. All four belong to active businesses that use them to sell and update them often. On a desktop, they look fine. Even so, when we dug in, we found between 19 and 35 issues on each one.
What struck us wasn't the number. It was that the same mistakes showed up on all four, even though they were in different industries, built by different teams and nowhere near the same size. If it happened to them, chances are it's happening to your site too.
The four sites, unnamed: an online store with over a thousand products, a medical practice with an online shop, a US service company and an architecture firm.
How we reviewed them
A proper audit isn't running your site through a free tool and sending over the PDF. On each site we looked at four things:
- The server, from the inside: plugins, user accounts, files that shouldn't be there, how emails go out.
- Every published page, one by one: titles, copy, links, images, phone numbers.
- Real speed on a phone, which is where most visits come from.
- What AI says when someone asks it about the business's service and area.
Here's what kept coming up.
The mistakes all four had in common
| Issue | How many | What it causes |
|---|---|---|
| Pages without a main heading (H1) | 4 of 4 | Google can't tell what the page is about. On three of the four, the homepage was missing one. |
| Images without alt text | 4 of 4 | Between 28% and 97% of images don't exist for Google or for anyone using a screen reader. |
| Images over 300 KB | 4 of 4 | From 41 to 4,744 heavy files. A single one on the homepage is enough to slow it down. |
| Data that doesn't say what the business does | 4 of 4 | Search engines and AI assistants can't tell what services it offers or where. |
| Pages without a Google description | 3 of 4 | Google builds the search snippet from whatever fragment it finds. One site was missing it on 87 of 147 pages. |
| Visible typos | 3 of 4 | In the homepage's main banner, in a form and on the contact page. |
None of these mistakes breaks the site. That's why they last for years: nobody notices. But each one chips away at the same thing: the right person finding you and getting in touch.
Inquiries you lose without ever knowing
This is the most expensive part, because it doesn't show up in any metric. A customer who couldn't reach you won't tell you they couldn't.
Real case: On the online store, the WhatsApp button in the footer led to a WhatsApp error page. The number had an extra space in it. It was on all 198 pages of the site.
It wasn't the only one. Two other sites listed three different phone numbers: one in the header, another in a button or an article, and a third on another page or in directories. When sources don't match, Google and AI pick one, and it's not always the one someone answers.
At the medical practice, emails from the site's 49 forms went out unauthenticated, through the hosting's internal mail. Those emails tend to land in spam or never arrive at all, and the owner thinks nobody is writing.
And at the service company, two pages in the main menu were empty: the title, the menu and the footer, nothing else. One of them was the very service it most wanted to sell.
Slow on mobile, even with good hosting
Google considers a page good when its main content appears in under 2.5 seconds. Measured on a phone, this is how long the homepage took:
- Service company: 16.1 seconds.
- Online store: 12.3 seconds.
- Medical practice: 3.4 seconds.
The interesting part is that in none of the three cases was the server the main problem. At the service company, the server responded in 30 milliseconds, and on desktop the same page loaded in 3.2 seconds. The weight was elsewhere: huge images and, above all, third-party code. Analytics, ad pixels and anti-spam load on every visit, even though nobody needs them until they interact. At the medical practice it added up to 1.7 MB, and more than half of that code went unused.
That's why switching hosts rarely fixes a slow website. What fixes it is sorting out what loads and when, and it can almost always be done without touching the design.
Google and AI don't quite get what you sell
To show up in search, every page has to say clearly what it's about and not compete with another page on the same site. We found the opposite:
- At the store, 1,642 of its 1,645 products had no description of their own. To Google, nearly all of them were the same page.
- At the service company, six blog posts were published twice, with up to 99% of the text identical. Twelve pages competing with each other.
- At the medical practice, 44 pages had no main heading, starting with the homepage.
And there's a new channel almost nobody is watching. On two of the sites we asked an AI assistant about the business's service and area, the way a customer would. In neither case did the business come up. The answer recommended competitors or cited directories. More and more people ask this way before they search on Google, and AI recommends what it can understand and verify.
Security: doors nobody closed
We found no sign of an attack on any of them. But several had what usually comes first:
- Outdated plugins: the store had 13 with pending updates. It's the most common way in on WordPress.
- Non-WordPress files in the main folder (3 of 4). They're usually leftovers from logging in through the hosting panel, but that's exactly where a backdoor hides, so nothing should be there that nobody can explain.
- Links to sites that no longer exist, like an old store that closed or the site's own previous domain.
None of this is an emergency until the day it is. That's exactly what monthly maintenance is for: updating, checking and fixing things before someone else finds the problem.
Why it happens (and it's not carelessness)
A company website grows in fits and starts: a new page for a campaign, a product uploaded in a rush, a plugin someone installed to try out, a phone number that changed. Each change makes sense on its own. The problem is that nobody looks at the whole, and mistakes pile up in the places the owner never visits, because they open their site on a desktop, already logged in and knowing where to click.
The good news is that almost everything we found can be fixed without a redesign. These are targeted fixes with a clear order of priority: first whatever costs you inquiries, then whatever holds Google back, and finally the polish.
Five things you can check on your site today
They don't replace an audit, but in fifteen minutes they'll tell you whether you need one:
- Open your site on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and tap every contact button: WhatsApp, phone, email.
- Send a test form and see whether it arrives, how long it takes and whether it lands in spam.
- Search your phone number and address on Google and check that they match on your site, on Google Maps and in directories.
- Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights (it's free, from Google) and look at the mobile result, not the desktop one.
- Ask ChatGPT about your service in your area, the way a customer would, and see whether you come up.
If any of these five surprised you, there's probably more underneath. And if you want to see how we handle a website from start to finish, take a look at our projects.
