How do I know if my website is working?

The numbers that actually matter

• Leads. Forms, calls and bookings from the site, tracked as key events. This is the one that pays the bills.
• Search clicks and impressions in Google Search Console. Are more people finding you, for the right searches?
• Top landing pages. Which pages bring people in, and do they lead to enquiries?
• Mobile speed, from the Core Web Vitals report.

Skip most of the rest. Bounce rate and time on page are easy to misread.

Simple health checks

Once a month, submit your own contact form and confirm it arrives. Tap the phone number on your phone. Search your business name and main service plus your city, and see what comes up. Check that your SSL certificate is valid and nothing looks broken. This takes ten minutes and catches the failures analytics can’t see.

Put it in your calendar on the same day each month. The point isn’t to find problems every time. It’s to make sure that when something breaks, you find out in weeks rather than months.

Ask the people who found you

Analytics is only part of it. A renovation contractor might get a referral who checked the website before calling. That’s the site working, even if the lead came from a neighbour. Asking new clients what they looked at before getting in touch tells you whether your site is helping close work, not only start it. If people say it nearly put them off, that’s worth knowing too. That feedback is often more useful than any report.

For clients on the Pulse Plan, I check the important things each month: forms deliver, pages load, nothing is broken, and search visibility is trending the right way. But the most useful question I ask them is simpler. Are the enquiries you’re getting from the site the kind you want? If yes, we protect what works. If not, we look at which pages attract the wrong people and adjust. A website isn’t working because a dashboard looks busy. It’s working when the right people get in touch.