What you are buying
A diagnosis is a written answer to three questions about a website you already have: what is wrong, what each thing costs to fix, and whether the site is worth fixing at all. It is not a sales document for a rebuild. It is a report you could hand to any competent developer, including one who is not us, and have them act on.
Here is what ours checks, in the order we do it, so you know what $299 buys.
1. Accounts and ownership
Before anything technical: who holds the domain, the hosting and the admin logins, and are they in your name. When do the domain, hosting and certificate renew, and whose card is on them. Where do the backups go, and when did one last run.
This comes first because it decides who is able to fix anything else, and because it is the finding most likely to be urgent. A domain renewing next week on a former developer's expired card is more pressing than any speed problem.
2. Forms and booking
Every form on the site is submitted, from a phone, and traced: does it arrive, where, to whom, and how long does it take. The booking flow is completed end to end, including the confirmation and reminder emails, checked in Gmail and Outlook, including spam folders. The calendar sync is tested with a personal event.
Dead forms and emails in spam are the two most common findings on inherited sites and the two most directly costing you customers.
3. Speed, on a real phone
The site is loaded on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not on office Wi-Fi, and timed. Then the causes are identified: image sizes, script weight, server response time, caching. Field data from Google is checked where the site has enough traffic to have any, because that is what Google uses.
The report says how long the site takes now, what the three biggest causes are, and what it would take on a phone after the fixes.
4. Mobile layout
Every main page on a phone: does text fit, do buttons work, does anything overlap or overflow, does the menu open. Faults are listed with a screenshot each.
5. Security
Software versions of the platform, theme and every plugin. Which plugins are abandoned or have known vulnerabilities. Whether the certificate is valid and renews automatically. Whether the admin login is exposed to brute-force attempts. Any sign of existing compromise: unexpected files, redirects, injected links.
6. Search
Whether Google can read the site: indexing status, whether important pages are blocked, what the titles and descriptions actually say in results, whether the hours and location are marked up. What the site currently ranks for, roughly, so that a rebuild's ranking risk can be weighed honestly.
7. Content and structure
Are the prices, hours and staff current, and can you change them yourself. Does the site have the pages a business like yours needs, and is anything important missing. Is the structure right for what the business now does, or has the business outgrown it.
8. Ownership of the words and pictures
Whose copy is it, whose photos, and are there licences for any stock imagery. This surprises people, but an inherited site with unlicensed images is a liability.
What the report contains
One document, in plain English, with:
- A summary of the findings, most urgent first.
- The fault list, each with a severity, evidence, and a fixed price to fix.
- The fix total and the rebuild total, over two years, with the reasoning.
- The recommendation: fix or rebuild, in a sentence, with the reason.
- The accounts list: every account the site depends on, where it is, and who holds it.
The report is delivered within three working days of getting access. It is yours. If you take it to another developer, that is fine, and it should hold up.
What a diagnosis is not
It is not a redesign proposal, a marketing audit or a keyword strategy. It does not tell you what colour the buttons should be. It tells you whether the site works, what is broken, and what it costs to put right. Those are the questions that decide what to do next, and they are the ones a sales conversation tends to skip.
After the diagnosis
Most reports end with a short list of fixes and a recommendation to keep the site. Those fixes are quoted in the report; the diagnosis and fix package covers the diagnosis and the common fixes together at a fixed price, and the diagnosis fee is deducted if you go ahead. If the report says rebuild, it says why, and the package price for the rebuild is on the same page as everything else.