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How to check a website you didn't build yourself

The draft looks finished. Four passes before it goes public: check every fact, read it as a stranger, load it on your phone, and use it like a customer.

In this series
Matte ceramic still life: an ivory sphere resting in a long tangerine triangular trough, with a small black cube standing sentinel nearby

The short answer

Before a website someone else built for you goes public, review it in four passes. Check every fact on every page against reality (phone number, hours, prices, addresses, service names, claims), because a site you didn’t write reads fluently and a fluent wrong fact is invisible. Read it once as a stranger who has never heard of you, and confirm the photos show your actual business and team. Open every page on your phone, then use the site like a customer: click every link, submit your own contact form, and confirm the message reaches you. Do all of this on a private draft, before the site is on your real domain. For a small site, fifteen careful minutes covers all four passes.

The draft comes back and it looks finished. Real headings, real sentences, photos in the right places, a contact page. That is the problem. A website you didn’t write yourself reads fluently, and fluent is what makes a wrong fact invisible. Your eye slides past “Open until 7pm” because the sentence is well formed, not because the hours are right.

You’re not proofreading. You’re the only person who can confirm what’s on the page. Four passes catch nearly everything, and on a five-page site they take about fifteen minutes.

Four passes before you publishON THE PRIVATE DRAFT01The fact passcheck every claimagainst reality02The stranger passfive secondsyour real photos03The phone passread it, tap itcall the number04The use-it passsend your ownform messagePublish on purpose

First, know which version you’re looking at

A good setup gives you a private draft at a temporary address, one you can open, review, and send to a friend without it being the site your customers reach. Your real domain stays untouched until you say so.

So ask two plain questions before you start. Is this address public? And what exactly makes the site live on my domain? Publishing should be a decision you make out loud, not something that happens as a side effect of an edit. If a page is half rewritten at 4pm, nobody should be able to find it at 4:05.

Pass one: check every fact against reality

Read every page slowly and check each specific claim against something outside your own memory. Not “that looks right,” but pull up the actual thing:

  • Phone number. Call it from another phone. A transposed digit reads perfectly.
  • Hours. Compare them to the sign on your door, holidays included.
  • Prices, including any “starting at” figure. A price that was true last season is still wrong today.
  • Address and service area. Suite number, street spelling, the towns you actually drive to.
  • Service names, in the words you use with customers, and nothing you stopped offering two winters ago.
  • Claims about you. Years in business, licenses, certifications, awards, guarantees.

Anything you can’t confirm comes off the page or gets marked “coming soon,” the disclosed placeholder move. A missing price costs you far less than a wrong one. A customer quoted $180 by your website and $240 by you starts the relationship annoyed.

Pass two: read it as a stranger

Now forget what you know about your business and read the site as someone who found you in a search result thirty seconds ago. Start with the homepage and give it five seconds: what does this business do, who is it for, and what were you supposed to do next? If you have to scroll to answer, the top of the page is doing the wrong job.

Then look hard at the photos. Are those people your team? A bright photo of four smiling strangers under “Meet the team” works right up until a customer walks in and recognizes nobody. Same for the work: if the gallery shows a kitchen you didn’t build, it comes out. Generic scenery is honest. Strangers presented as your staff are not.

Last, hunt for anything the site promises on your behalf. “24/7 emergency callouts” when the phone goes to voicemail at 9pm. “Free consultation” you never agreed to offer. “Same-day appointments” when you’re booked three weeks out. A promise on a website is a promise.

Pass three: open it on your phone

Assume the first person to see your site is standing on a sidewalk holding a phone. Load every page on yours, not only the homepage.

Can you read the text without pinching? Are the buttons big enough to hit with a thumb and far enough apart that you don’t miss? Does the phone number start a call when you tap it, instead of sitting there as decoration? Does an image push the page sideways so you have to swipe to finish a sentence? Fix those before you send the link to anyone.

Pass four: use the site like a customer

Reading it isn’t enough. Use it.

  1. Click every item in the menu and every link in the footer. Links pointing at pages that don’t exist yet are the usual find.
  2. Submit your own contact form with a real message (“test from Dana, Tuesday morning”), then go look for it. Check spam. If it doesn’t arrive in a few minutes, the form is broken even though it said thank you.
  3. Tap the map and confirm it lands on your door, not on a similarly named street across town.
  4. If you take bookings, book yourself an appointment start to finish, then cancel it.
  5. Click the social icons. They often point at a platform’s homepage rather than at your account.

A contact form that goes nowhere is worse than no form at all. Somebody typed their problem and their number into it, believed they had reached you, and waited.

Then publish on purpose

Launch is not the finish line. It’s the moment your mistakes get an audience, and the first person to notice the wrong phone number shouldn’t be a customer trying to use it. Four passes, one page at a time, fifteen careful minutes. Then say the word.

Common questions

Can my AI check the site for me instead?
It can do part of it. An AI can list every fact on a page, point out links that go nowhere, and tell you which details it was never given. It cannot know whether your phone number is correct or whether you still offer a service. Confirming facts against reality is the one part that has to be you.
What do I do when I find something wrong?
Tell your AI which page it's on and what the correct version is, then re-check that page after the change. Fix things in batches rather than one at a time, and keep the site on its private draft address until the batch is done. A half-corrected page is not a page you want a customer landing on.
Do I really need to check every page, or just the homepage?
Every page, but it goes faster than you think. The details that get repeated everywhere, like your phone number and hours in the footer, only need confirming once. The pages people skip reviewing are usually the service pages, and that's where old prices sit.
What if I can't confirm something yet?
Leave it off the page or mark it as coming soon. A blank spot reads as a business that hasn't finished setting up, which is true and harmless. A confident wrong detail reads as a business that doesn't know what it charges.
How do I know the site isn't already public while I'm reviewing it?
Ask directly: is this address public, and what makes the site live on my domain? A good setup gives you a temporary review address that isn't indexed by search engines and isn't linked from anywhere, plus a separate step that puts the site on your own domain. If nobody can tell you which one you're looking at, don't put your domain on it yet.