The Free Tools Every Small Business Should Use to Check Their Website

Most business owners never see their website the way a first-time visitor does. You open it on a fast connection, on a device that has cached everything, already knowing where to click. Your customers get none of that. The good news is you do not need to pay anyone to find the gap. A handful of free checks will tell you, in plain language, what is quietly costing you enquiries. Here is the tour, in the order worth doing them.

Start with the full picture

Before diving into any single metric, run one overall scan. A website audit checks the five things that decide whether a site earns its keep at once: how fast it loads, whether it works on a phone, whether Google can read it, whether a ready-to-buy visitor can actually reach you, and whether it looks trustworthy. It gives you a prioritised list instead of a pile of numbers, so you know what to fix first. The free audit linked below does exactly this, and it does not ask for your email to show you the result.

Then check speed and mobile, because that is where visitors leave

Speed is the cheapest conversion fix that exists, because every second of load time quietly sends people away before they see anything. A free speed test shows you your server response time, page weight, and Google's own mobile performance score, translated into what it means for your business rather than a waterfall chart.

Mobile matters just as much, and for a specific reason: Google predominantly ranks the mobile version of your site, and most of your visitors are on a phone. Google retired its own mobile-friendly test in 2023, but the check still matters, so a free mobile-friendly test tells you whether your page adapts, blocks zoom, or jumps around while loading.

Check the small things that lose trust

Two quiet killers are worth a minute each. First, how your link looks when shared: paste any page into a link preview checker and you will see the exact card WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Google show. If it is a bare grey box with no image, every share is a lost first impression. Second, broken links: a link checker finds the dead ends that send interested visitors to error pages and waste the attention Google gives your site.

If you sell locally, one more free win: a Google review link and a printable counter sign make it effortless for happy customers to leave the reviews that decide who shows up in local search. The tools to generate both are free and linked below.

What to do with what you find

Run these checks and you will usually find that your site needs three or four specific fixes, not a rebuild. That is good news, because specific problems have specific, affordable solutions. Fix the ones you can, and for the ones you cannot, at least you now know precisely what to ask for and roughly what it should cost, instead of being sold a rebuild you may not need.

Every one of these tools is free, most run entirely in your browser, and none of them harvest your data. We built them for our own work and opened them up, because a business that trusts our free tools is a business we would be glad to build software for one day.