How to Grade a Prospect's Website Before You Pitch

Most website pitches fail before anyone reads them, because they are aimed at the wrong business. The owner with a clean, fast, mobile-friendly site does not need you, and the owner with a broken one has heard "your site looks dated" from every agency in town. Grading the site first tells you which of the two you are talking to, and gives you something specific to say to the second.

Here is the five-minute check we run on every prospect.

1. Open it on a phone first

Roughly two-thirds of local searches happen on a phone, so start there. Look for three things:

• Does the page fit the screen, or do you have to pinch and scroll sideways?
• Can you tap the phone number and the address with a thumb?
• Is the most important information (what they do, where, when they are open) visible without scrolling?

A site that renders desktop-width on a phone is usually a site nobody has touched in years. That is your opening.

2. Check the padlock

Type the address without https:// and see where you land. A site still served over plain HTTP gets a "Not secure" label in every modern browser, and Google has treated HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014. It is a small technical fault with a large visible consequence, which makes it easy to explain to an owner.

3. Read the title and description

Right-click, view source, and find the <title> tag. You are looking for the business name plus what it does plus where it is, in that rough order. "Home" or "Welcome" on its own means the site is invisible for the searches that actually bring customers.

While you are there, look for a LocalBusiness block of structured data. Without it Google is guessing at the name, address and opening hours, and the map listing is doing all the work the website should share.

4. Feel how fast it loads

Refresh on your phone using mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. Count to three. If the main content is not on screen by then, the site is losing visitors before they see it. You do not need a lab score for this; the owner will recognise the feeling because they have felt it on their own site.

5. Look for the year

Find the copyright line in the footer. Then look for the tell-tale signs of old tooling: layout tables, <font> tags, a jQuery 1.x reference, Flash placeholders. A stale year plus dated markup is the clearest signal that the site has no one looking after it, and that a fresh build will not step on any existing relationship.

Turning the grade into a pitch

The grade is for you, not the owner. Nobody wants to be told their site fails five tests. What works is showing them a better site and using the grade to explain why it is better: "yours does not fit on a phone; this one does. Yours shows 'Not secure'; this one has the padlock." The faults become the story of the improvement instead of a list of complaints.

That is the whole idea behind building the showcase site before you make contact. The grade tells you who to build for; the finished site does the pitching.

Run the five checks on your next ten prospects and you will find that two or three of them are worth a build. Those are the ones to spend your time on.