There's a thread where HVAC techs list the things they hear on every single call. Buried in it:
"A diagnostics fee? It says free estimates on your website."
Picture where that conversation happens. You're standing in somebody's driveway or their basement. You've already driven there. They're holding a phone with your own website on it, reading your own words back to you.
You're not going to win that. You're going to eat the fee or eat the job, and either way you're now the company that changed the deal.
Nobody wrote that line on purpose. Somebody built the site four years ago, "free estimates" was in the template, and it's been quietly making promises for you ever since.
This isn't a design problem
Every "go check your website" article is about how it looks. Load speed, colors, mobile layout. All real, all worth doing.
This is a different thing. Your site can look perfect and still be full of facts that stopped being true two years ago. Nobody checks those, because there's no dashboard that flags them and nothing breaks visibly when they go stale.
So here's the seven minute pass. Do it on your phone, in your truck, with a coffee.
1. Every place the site says "free"
Search your own site for the word. Free estimate. Free quote. Free inspection. Free consultation.
Then decide, one by one, whether that's still how you operate. A lot of guys started with free estimates when they were hungry and quietly moved to a diagnostic fee once the tire kickers ate a season. The site never got the memo.
If you charge now, say so. "$89 diagnostic, waived if you book the repair" on the page costs you the callers who were never going to pay anyway, and it kills that driveway argument permanently. That's a good trade.
2. Your hours, in all three places they exist
This one's stupid and extremely common.
I audited an electrical contractor last month and found three different sets of hours on the same website. 8 to 6 in the footer, 7 to 5 on the contact page, 9 to 5 in the header. Plus whatever the Google Business Profile said, which was a fourth answer.
Nobody did that on purpose either. Pages got built at different times by different people. But a customer who reads 7am and calls at 7:15 and gets voicemail has learned something about you, and it isn't about hours.
Pick the real ones. Fix all four spots. The Google profile is the one that matters most, because that's where most people actually look.
3. Tap your own phone number, from every page
Not the homepage. Every page.
On that same audit, the number in the header worked fine. The tap-to-call on the residential services page dialed a completely different phone. An old number, from before they changed carriers, sitting on a page that gets traffic.
There is no alert for this. The page loads, the button looks right, and calls just quietly go nowhere. It could run like that for years and the only symptom is that one page never seems to produce any work.
So tap it. Every page that has a number on it. Takes two minutes and it's the highest stakes item on this list.
This is a different thing from where the number sits on the page, which matters too and which I've already gone through here. Right now I only care whether the one you've got rings your actual phone.
4. Read your service list and cross off what you quit
Every trade drifts. You stopped doing service calls and went install only. You dropped commercial. You quit taking the crawlspace jobs because your back did.
The website still lists all of it, so you're still getting called for all of it. Every one of those calls is a conversation where you say no, which wastes your time and leaves a person mildly annoyed at your company.
Cut them. A shorter services page is also a better ranking page, because it's more specific about what you actually do.
5. The service area, same treatment
Same logic. If there's a town in your footer you haven't worked in since 2022 and wouldn't drive to now, take it off.
You're not making yourself smaller. You're stopping calls you're going to decline.
6. Submit your own contact form
From your phone, on cell data, not the office wifi. Then go find where it landed.
Did it arrive at all? Is it in spam? Is it going to an email somebody actually opens, or to an address the last web guy set up that nobody's logged into since?
I've seen a site collecting leads into three different email addresses, none of which were checked daily. Those leads didn't bounce. They arrived. They just arrived somewhere nobody was standing.
That's the worst version of this whole list, because there's no symptom. A lead you never got doesn't show up in any report. It just looks like a slow month.
7. Anything with a number in it
Last pass. Look for claims with digits attached.
Years in business. Number of jobs. Response time promises like "we answer within an hour." Warranty lengths. "Same day service."
Every one of those is a promise somebody can hold you to, and half of them got written by a marketer trying to sound impressive. If you can't back it up on your worst week, change it or cut it. A promise you keep 60% of the time generates more bad reviews than making no promise at all.
What this actually is
None of this is website work. It's not design and it's not SEO.
It's that your website is a document your customers read before they meet you, and it's setting the terms of the deal without asking you first. When it's wrong, you don't find out from a report. You find out standing in a driveway, arguing with somebody who has your own words on their screen and is completely right.
Seven minutes. Go unf*ck it before somebody reads it back to you.
If you'd rather I just look, send me your site. I'll run these seven and tell you what I find, and if it all comes back clean I'll tell you that too, because that's a useful thing to know for free.