Before a meeting now, I spend ten minutes on the website. Not judging the design. Just clicking things.
The last one I looked at had a button that said View Menu. It went to the homepage. So did Contact. This is a restaurant. Those are the two most expensive links on a restaurant website to have pointing at the wrong place, and both were broken.
Nobody had told him. That is the part worth sitting with.
Broken things do not look broken
A dead link does not throw an error. It takes you somewhere, just not where you wanted. Most people assume they clicked wrong, try once more, then leave and look you up on Google instead. You never hear about it. Your analytics show a visit.
I found other things in that ten minutes. A delivery link with a token in it stamped 2021. Two different phone numbers for the same location, one in the contact block and one in the footer. App store badges sitting under copy that said the app was coming soon. A copyright line two years out of date.
the one that surprised me most
The business name appeared six different ways across the site, Facebook, Yelp, Tripadvisor and the ordering link. One of them had a word misspelled, in a link customers click every day.
None of it is anyone’s fault
This is what happens to a website after a few years. Someone built it, something changed, a plugin updated, a platform migrated. Nobody is assigned to click every link once a quarter, because that is nobody’s job.
And the people running these businesses are working. They are not sitting at a laptop testing their own navigation. They are on the line at six.
So I am just going to tell people
I have decided to do this audit for free, for anybody who asks, whether or not they ever work with me. It takes me a morning and it is the single most useful thing I can hand someone I have just met. Nobody argues with a list of their own broken things.
If you want me to look at yours, ask. No pitch attached, and I will send it whether or not you want anything else.