Before you contact a web design company, it’s worth spending twenty honest minutes looking at your own website the way a stranger would. You don’t need any design training for this. You need a phone, a laptop, and a willingness to actually click through your own site instead of assuming it works the way you remember it.
Doing this first means you walk into any conversation with a designer already knowing what’s actually wrong, instead of vaguely feeling like “the site needs updating.” It also means you won’t pay for a full rebuild when a handful of specific fixes would have solved the real problem.
Key Takeaways
Step 1: The 5-Second Test
Open your homepage on your phone. Give yourself exactly 5 seconds to look at it, then close the tab and answer three questions from memory:
- What does this business actually do?
- Who is it for?
- What am I supposed to do next?
If you can’t answer all three confidently, and you already know your own business, imagine how a stranger who’s never heard of you would do. This is usually the single most valuable five minutes of a self-audit, because a confusing homepage undermines everything else on the site.
Step 2: Click Everything Yourself
Go through your site like a customer would, and actually click, tap, and submit everything. Specifically:
- Click every item in your main navigation menu.
- Click your logo. It should take you back to the homepage. This sounds trivial, but it’s a widely expected behavior, and it’s surprising how often it’s broken.
- Fill out your contact form completely and submit it. Confirm you actually receive the message, not just that the form appears to submit.
- Tap your phone number and WhatsApp link on an actual phone. Confirm they open the dialer or WhatsApp rather than doing nothing.
- Click through to at least one page from every major section of your site (each service, each product category), not just the pages you personally visit most often.
A broken link or a contact form that silently fails doesn’t announce itself. You won’t get an error message telling you a customer tried and gave up. You just lose them, quietly, and never know it happened.
Step 3: Check Your Site on an Actual Phone
Not a resized browser window on your laptop, an actual phone, ideally on mobile data rather than office WiFi, since that’s a more honest picture of what most of your visitors experience. While you’re there:
- Notice how long it takes before you can actually read the main content, not just how long until something appears.
- Try filling out your contact form with one thumb. Notice where you have to pinch, zoom, or correct a mis-tap.
- Check whether any text is cut off, overlapping, or requires horizontal scrolling to read.
Our guide to mobile-first design in Uganda goes deeper into why this matters specifically here: most of your visitors are on mobile, and a meaningful share are on budget phones and slower connections, not the fast office WiFi most people test on by default.
Step 4: Run a Free Speed and Mobile-Usability Check
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is free, requires no account, and takes under a minute. Enter your homepage URL and it will give you a score for both mobile and desktop, along with specific, plain-language issues it found (slow-loading images, render-blocking code, and similar). You don’t need to understand every technical term in the report. You just need to note the overall score and the top two or three flagged issues to mention when you talk to a designer.
Step 5: Check Your Content, Not Just Your Design
A surprising number of “we need a redesign” conversations turn out to actually be content problems wearing a design costume. Before assuming the visual design is the issue, check:
- Is your business information (hours, location, phone number) accurate and current?
- Are your prices, if listed, still correct?
- Do your photos actually represent your current work, products, or team?
- Is there anything referencing a past year, an old promotion, or a service you no longer offer?
If our signs your website needs a redesign guide describes your situation once you’ve been through this list, you’re likely looking at a genuine design problem. If most of what you found is outdated information, a content update might solve more of the problem than a full rebuild would, at a fraction of the cost.
Step 6: Write Down What You Found
Before you talk to anyone, turn what you noticed into a short, specific list. Not “the site feels old,” but “the contact form doesn’t send an email,” “PageSpeed Insights scored us 31 on mobile,” “three of our service pages still show 2024 pricing.” A list like this changes the entire conversation with a designer. Instead of a vague scoping exercise, you’re both starting from the same concrete facts.
The Quick Checklist
- [ ] Passed the 5-second test (or noted exactly why it didn’t)
- [ ] Clicked every navigation link and confirmed none are broken
- [ ] Logo links back to the homepage
- [ ] Contact form submitted successfully and the message actually arrived
- [ ] Phone number and WhatsApp link work when tapped on a real phone
- [ ] Checked the site on an actual phone, on mobile data
- [ ] Ran PageSpeed Insights and noted the score plus top issues
- [ ] Confirmed hours, prices, and contact details are current
- [ ] Confirmed photos represent your actual current work or team
- [ ] Wrote down specific findings, not general impressions
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need any technical knowledge to do this?
No. Every step here only requires clicking through your own site the way a customer would and reading the plain-language summary that a free tool like PageSpeed Insights gives you. None of it requires understanding code or design theory.
What if I find a lot of problems? Does that mean I need a full rebuild?
Not necessarily. Broken links, outdated content, and a low PageSpeed score can sometimes be fixed without touching the overall design. A full rebuild becomes the right answer when the underlying structure itself is the problem, not just individual pieces of content or a handful of technical issues.
How long should this actually take?
Around 20 minutes for a typical small business site. The 5-second test and clicking through your navigation take a few minutes each; the PageSpeed Insights check takes under a minute to run.
Should I do this even if I’m not planning to change my website right now?
It’s worth doing periodically regardless, since broken forms and outdated content can go unnoticed for a long time on a site nobody actively tests. Catching a broken contact form early is worth far more than catching it a year later after wondering why inquiries dried up.
Once you have your list of findings, our 20 questions to ask a web design company will help you have a focused, efficient first conversation with whoever you choose to work with.