Website Roast Checklist: 10 Signs Your Site Is Costing You Leads

You don’t need an expert to find most website problems. You need fifteen honest minutes and the discipline to look at your site like a stranger who owes you nothing. Here’s the checklist — the same ten categories a CactusScore™ roast reviews, in self-serve form.

For each one: open your site (on your phone, not your laptop) and answer brutally.

1. The five-second test

Look at your homepage for five seconds. Close it. Could a stranger say what you do, who it’s for, and why you’re credible? If the answer lives “further down the page,” it doesn’t exist — most visitors never scroll past an unclear opening.

2. The thumb test

On your phone: is every button comfortably tappable? Does text read without zooming? Do menus work one-handed? Most local-business traffic is mobile; a site that’s merely usable on mobile — rather than designed for it — quietly sheds the majority of its visitors.

3. The patience test

Load your site on cellular data, not wifi. Count. If you’re waiting more than a couple of seconds for something readable, so is everyone else — except they don’t wait, they leave. (Why fast websites convert better explains what to fix.)

4. The one-sentence offer

Can your homepage’s first screen be summarized as “We do X for Y, and here’s why us”? Vague headlines — “Quality you can trust,” “Your partner in excellence” — describe every business, which means they describe none. Specific beats clever, every time.

5. The next-step test

Pick any page. Is there one obvious thing to do next — a button, a form, a clear path toward contact? Pages that end in nothing (or end in three competing somethings) are dead ends, and every dead end is a lead that was interested and left anyway.

6. The proof test

Find the exact spot where you ask visitors to act. Is there a reason to believe you within eyeshot — reviews, credentials, guarantees, specifics, real work? Proof on a separate page is proof most visitors never see. Reassurance has to live where hesitation happens.

7. The imagery test

Do your photos look like your business — or like a stock library’s idea of one? Generic handshake photos and watermark-adjacent stock actively subtract trust. (If you don’t have good photos, that’s solvable without a photoshoot — see Client Photos vs Stock vs AI Images.)

8. The form test

Fill out your own contact form. Did it work? Was it short? Did you land on a confirmation that says what happens next? Now the harder question: did you get notified, and would a real enquiry get a reply within a business day? Broken or bottomless forms are the most expensive bugs on the internet.

9. The ten-second contact test

From any page, can a stranger start contacting you within ten seconds? Buried contact links, multi-step menus, and footer-only paths all fail. (This site’s answer, for reference: a form or chat entry point from every page.)

10. The findability test

Search your business name plus your service. Do you show up looking credible — sensible page titles, real descriptions? Then the newer question: ask an AI assistant “who does [your service] in [your area]?” Structured, entity-clear sites increasingly win those answers. (How AI Search Changes Website SEO covers this shift.)

Scoring yourself

• 8–10 passes: Strong site. Polish, don’t panic.
• 5–7: Solid base with real leaks — the kind paid traffic exposes fast.
• 0–4: Your website is almost certainly costing you leads, and probably ad money too.

Two caveats from experience: owners grade their own sites generously, and the checks that matter most (speed, clarity, proof) are the ones people skip. If you want the stranger’s-eyes version — every category reviewed by a human, with fixes ranked by impact — that’s the free website roast. It exists precisely because self-diagnosis has a blind spot the size of your familiarity with your own business.