Optimising a site

My site's live, but I'm not convinced it's working as hard as it could — and I couldn't tell you why.

A website is a bit like a lab instrument: it can look perfectly healthy and still be reading two degrees off. Pages that load slowly on a phone. Products filed under the wrong heading. Empty collections sapping your search equity. A tracking setup that was installed once, years ago, by someone who's since moved on. None of it shouts, and all of it quietly adds up.

The good news is that this is the most fixable kind of problem there is. We take a proper look under the bonnet, tell you what we find in plain English, and put the easy wins first.

Sound familiar?

• The site looks fine to you, but you've a nagging feeling something's off — slow on a phone, odd bits of navigation, pages Google doesn't seem to notice.
• Analytics is installed and you open it roughly never, because the numbers don't mean anything to you. Or you don't know which numbers are the right ones to look at.
• Someone's mentioned "technical SEO" or "product feeds" and you nodded along. Clearly important, but at least a little baffling.
• You've made changes and honestly can't tell whether they helped.
• You'd just like someone to explain how your own site works, in English.

What's usually going on

• Setup debt. Things done quickly at launch that never got revisited — categories that made sense with twelve products and don't with a hundred and twelve, duplicate pages, missing product details.
• Catalogue and data. Titles, descriptions, categories and product feeds. It's the least glamorous layer and often the one holding everything else back. And don't even get us started on the importance of metadata…
• Nothing measuring. If your site isn't set up to tell you what's working, every decision is a guess — however good your instincts are. What you need is real, quantifiable answers.
• The platform being a closed book. You shouldn't need to understand the techie side to run a shop. We'll either walk you through it or just look after it for you — entirely your call.

How we'd tackle it

1. Take a reading. A proper look at speed, mobile, structure, product data, tracking and accessibility, using real tools and a human to interpret them.
2. Report in plain English, easy wins first. Not a panic list of two hundred "issues" — the handful that matter, ranked by effort against payoff.
3. Fix what's worth fixing. We'll do it, or hand you a clear list to work through yourself. Either's fine.

Where we'd start

With a diagnostic, not a rebuild. Which one depends on what's bothering you — a store teardown for a general "something's off", a technical SEO audit if it's about being found, a product feed audit if you sell on Google Shopping, an analytics health check if you can't trust your numbers. Not sure? The teardown is the cheapest way to find out which of the others you actually need.

The honest bit

Most automated site reports are mostly noise. We'll tell you which findings are worth your time and which you can safely ignore — and we won't promise a ranking or a sales figure at the end of it, because nobody can (well, nobody who's actually honest). What we can promise is that you'll understand your own site better than you did.

Tell us what's nagging at you about your site. Get in touch

Related challenges: Turning site visitors into customers · Getting people onto site