When did you last use your own website on your phone? (Use, not edit it.)

Most business owners find their own website kind of boring to use.

They have no real reason to visit it themselves, so they tune out to it. They have seen it so many times that they stop seeing it at all. And in the meantime, things can slowly get out of alignment. Features can get added and then not removed when they’re no longer needed, and content can get moved around, but not tidied up. The business focus or visitor needs might shift, but the website doesn’t.

I recently audited a business website that looked like it had a lot of pages, but when I went through them one by one, many of them were still filled with filler text, unfinished sections, and pages that clearly hadn’t been touched since the site launched. The owner had been so relieved to finally get the new site live that they never went back and checked that every single page was useful to visitors. It happened to be a beautifully designed site, but the attention to detail just wasn’t there, and that matters enormously when someone is deciding whether to trust you with their business. (For a similar manufacturing website example, see ​this post​ by my colleague Dianna Huff.)

People are not coming to your website in a calm, relaxed, unhurried frame of mind anymore.

The baseline level of stress and overwhelm people are carrying around has just been climbing for years. I don’t need to convince you of this, but it’s often not connected to using a website. When someone lands on your site and is immediately hit with a pop-up (cookies!), then another pop-up (subscribe!), then yet another one (turn off your ad blocker!), then another one (a video ad!), and then a busy layout pulling their attention in six directions, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed and leave. This isn’t because your product or service isn’t right for them, but because the experience was frustrating and stressful.

What is the experience you are actually creating on your website?

What is different about going to your website versus just asking AI a question and getting a quick text-based answer? What is your website’s personality? What do you want people to feel when they land there? What are the most important things you want them to do? Is everything in total alignment around that?

After working on the ​Missing Persons Guide website​, I have been thinking a lot about this. Trauma-informed design is about removing every possible obstacle from someone who is already overwhelmed and just needs to find what they need. But really, that principle applies to every single website. Nobody has patience for complexity when they’re in a hurry. Fresh eyes from someone who understands design, data, strategy, and how people are actually using the internet right now is so valuable.

We do these audits as a ​Website and Brand Audit​: a manual, expert review of how your brand and website look, feel, and communicate, delivered as a video walkthrough and a designed PDF report with a clear, prioritized action plan delivered within 7 business days for $497.

If you are a food blogger, there is also a ​Food Blog Brand Audit​ specifically tailored to your world, also $497 – how your site works for sponsors, how your content is structured, and how easy it actually is to cook from. I audited a food blog recently that was so chaotic to cook from it was almost unusable. It was stressful just to use, which is part of what pushed me to build ​Binder-Ready Recipes​, but for people still cooking from their screens, the website experience itself really matters too.

If you have been ignoring a feeling that something is off with your website, please ​book an audit​.

And if you’ve been thinking about a new website or a refresh, we’d love to hear from you. You can ​book a call here​.