The review
What we actually look at in a 45-minute website review
6 August 2026 · 6 min read · ENGIS Studio
Every engagement here starts with a review: forty-five minutes, no cost, and a written follow-up with the three changes we would make first. People sometimes assume that means we spend the time critiquing the design. Mostly, we do not.
A website is a commercial instrument. Whether it is winning work or quietly losing it is decided by a handful of things, most of them invisible on a screenshot. This is the list we actually work through — published so you can run it against your own site before you talk to anyone, including us.
1. What the first screen says to a stranger
Not whether it is pretty — whether a visitor who has never heard of you can answer three questions within seconds: what does this business do, who is it for, and what should I do next. A surprising number of established businesses fail all three while their much smaller competitors pass.
We read the first screen the way a cautious buyer does: with no context, no goodwill, and one thumb on the back button.
2. The path from interest to enquiry
We walk the journey a genuinely interested visitor takes and count the friction: dead-end pages, contact forms that ask nothing useful, phone numbers hidden behind a menu, booking that turns out to be an email in disguise.
The question is never "is there a contact page". It is: how much work does an interested person have to do before you find out they exist — and how much of the qualifying conversation could the site have already had on your behalf?
3. Whether the site proves anything
Claims are free, so buyers discount them. We look for the things that cannot be faked cheaply: named work, real photographs, specifics about who you are and where you operate, and consistency between what the site says and what your reviews, socials and register entries say.
If the site asserts quality but offers no evidence, visitors do not split the difference — they assume the competitor with the case studies is the safer call.
4. Speed, stability and accessibility
We measure rather than eyeball: how fast the site loads on a mid-range phone on a mobile connection, whether the layout jumps while it loads, and whether it can be used with a keyboard and a screen reader. These are the mechanics search engines score and real visitors silently punish.
This is also where a decade of accumulated plugins, trackers and page-builder layers tends to show up — as seconds, and seconds are exits.
5. Who actually controls it
Domain, hosting, source code, content, analytics. We check whose name each is registered under, because the answer decides what you can do next — with us or with anyone. It is common to discover that a business does not control its own domain, or that the only copy of the website lives inside a former contractor’s page-builder account.
None of this is visible on the site itself, which is exactly why it gets missed until the worst possible moment.
6. Whether anyone would know if it worked
Last: is anything measured? Not vanity traffic — the numbers that connect the site to the business. Enquiries per week and where they came from. Which pages people leave from. Whether the change someone paid for last year moved anything at all.
A site with no measurement cannot be improved, only redecorated. It is often the cheapest thing on this list to fix, and the one that makes every later decision easier.
What comes out the other side
After the call you get a short written review: the three changes we would make first, in order, with the reasoning — and an indicative investment band if you want the work done. Sometimes the honest conclusion is that a rebuild is not worth it for you yet, and we say that too.
If you never speak to us at all, the six checks above are still the audit worth running. Most of them take an afternoon and cost nothing.
The review exists because guessing is expensive. Forty-five minutes of looking properly is not.