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Check Your Website Yourself: a 30-Minute Checklist

How to check your website without expert knowledge: Google listing, phone, loading time, Google profile, mandatory pages and barriers. With free tools.

By Ioan Serban7 min read

You can check whether your website is doing its job yourself, in about 30 minutes. All you need is your phone, a laptop and free tools from Google. Seven questions are enough: Does Google know your pages? What does your listing in search look like? Does the site work on a phone? How fast does it load? Is your Google profile right? Are the mandatory pages there? And can every visitor use the site?

For each point, this checklist shows what to look at and how to spot a problem. Why Google pays attention to these things is explained in the article on technical SEO.

What you need

  • Your phone, ideally on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi.
  • A laptop or PC with the Chrome browser.
  • PageSpeed Insights for the loading time, free and without an account.
  • If you have it: access to Google Search Console. This is Google’s free tool for website owners. You can work through the list without it, you just see less at point 1.

Note down what you notice at each point. The notes help later, when you change something yourself or hire someone to do it.

1. Does Google know your pages?

Type site:your-domain.de into Google, with your own address instead of the example. Google then shows pages of your website that it knows. If the home page or an important service is missing, that is a warning sign.

The list is only a rough guide, though. Google itself says that a site: search does not always show every page and is not suitable for counting (Google Search Central). Search Console is more precise. Its “Page indexing” report shows which pages Google has included and why others are missing (Google Help). If you don’t have access yet, it is worth setting up.

2. What does your Google listing look like?

Search for your business name and for your main service with your town, such as “electrician Landsberg”. Look at your listing: the blue line at the top is the page title, the text below it is the description.

A good page title says in a few words what you offer and where. Google recommends a separate, concise title for every page (Google Search Central). If it only says “Home”, or every page has the same title, you are wasting the most important space in search.

This is one of the findings I see most often in website checks. For the Munich tax firm Trinity Tax, Google showed only “Home” as the title in June 2025. There was no description, so Google took some text from the page. Searchers couldn’t tell who was behind it. What happened next is in the Trinity Tax case study.

Google doesn’t always use your description. It often builds the text from the page content (Google Search Central). A description of your own is still worth it: if it describes the page better than the rest of the text, Google uses it.

3. Does the website work on a phone?

Open your website on your own phone and do what a customer does:

  • Can you find the phone number or contact form within a few seconds?
  • Does tapping the phone number start the call?
  • Can you read the text without zooming? Does everything fit the width, without swiping sideways?
  • Can you hit the menu and buttons easily with your thumb?
  • Send yourself a test enquiry through the form. Does it arrive?

Google’s well-known “Mobile-Friendly Test” has not existed since December 2023 (Google Search Central), even though some guides still recommend it. Your own phone is the better test anyway. The next point gives you technical measurements.

4. How fast does the page load?

Enter your address in PageSpeed Insights. After about a minute you see two kinds of results:

  • Real measurements are at the top, if there were enough visitors. They show how fast your page loaded for Chrome users over the last 28 days (Google documentation). Small websites often don’t have this data.
  • A simulated measurement follows below, with a score of up to 100. It varies from test to test and mainly helps you find the causes.

For the real measurements, Google sets clear limits. A page is good if its largest visible content appears within 2.5 seconds, it responds to a tap or click within 200 milliseconds and hardly anything shifts while it loads (web.dev). These three values are called Core Web Vitals.

The most common reason for slow pages that I see is images that are too large: photos straight from a camera or phone, often several megabytes each. Further down, PageSpeed Insights shows which files slow the page down.

5. Is your Google Business Profile right?

Search for your business name in Google Maps and compare the profile with your website. Do the name, address, phone number and opening hours match? Does the link in the profile lead to your website?

According to Google, complete and correct details help you appear in local search. You can’t buy a better position there (Google Help). How profile, website and reviews work together is explained in the article on local SEO.

You can check these points in a few minutes:

  • Legal Notice (Impressum): can you reach it from every page with one click? The mandatory details are now in § 5 of the German Digital Services Act, DDG for short (§ 5 DDG). It has applied since May 2024 and replaced the Telemedia Act. If your Legal Notice still cites “§ 5 TMG”, nobody has looked at it for a long time.
  • Privacy policy: is it just as easy to find? It explains which data your website collects, for example through the contact form (Art. 13 GDPR).
  • Cookies: if your website stores or reads data on visitors’ devices, for example for statistics, it generally needs their consent. The exception is what is strictly necessary to run the site (§ 25 TDDDG).
  • HTTPS: does the address start with “https://”? Without encryption, Chrome shows “Not secure” in the address bar.

This check only shows whether the pages are there. Only a lawyer can give a binding opinion on whether their content is legally correct.

7. Can every visitor use the site?

Three simple tests come from the “Easy Checks” of the W3C, the body behind the web standards (W3C). In brackets is the matching WCAG rule. The WCAG are the international guidelines for accessible websites. The number helps when you talk to your web designer about it.

  • Keyboard: click into the page and press the Tab key several times. Can you always see where you are? Can you reach the menu, links and form? (WCAG 2.4.7)
  • Zoom: enlarge the page to 200 % with Ctrl and Plus. Does everything stay readable, without text being cut off or overlapping? (WCAG 1.4.4)
  • Contrast: is light text on a light background still easy to read, even outdoors on a phone? (WCAG 1.4.3)

Whether your website has to be accessible by law is explained in the article Does My Website Have to Be Accessible?

When an outside view is worth it

The checklist finds the obvious problems. Two things it doesn’t show: whether Google understands your pages correctly and whether your texts answer your customers’ questions. For the first, Google offers the Rich Results Test. It checks the structured data, meaning information meant only for search engines. Reading its results takes some experience, though.

If you are unsure about several points, I look at your website in the free website check. I check loading time, how it looks on a phone, the basics for Google and how easily local customers find you. I also point out obvious barriers. You usually get the result by email within three to seven days. The check is not a legal review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need paid SEO tools? No. Google search, PageSpeed Insights and Search Console are enough for this checklist. All three are free.

My PageSpeed Insights score is low. Is that bad? Not necessarily. The score comes from the simulated measurement and varies. The real measurements matter more, if your page has them. Use the score mainly to find the causes, such as images that are too large.

An important page is missing from the site: search. What now? Check the address in Search Console with URL Inspection. It shows whether Google has included the page and what stands in the way (Google Help).