Website Audit — prepared by Apex Site Audits
█████████ ██Company name withheld, Inc.
█████████-██web address withheld.com / homepage and contact page
TRADE Landscaping & hardscaping
REGION Mountain west, USA
REVIEWED By hand, not by scanner
FINDINGS 10
Read the first two and stop if you like. They are the ones costing this business money today, and between them they take about ten minutes to fix. Everything after that is worth doing; nothing after that is urgent.
Each finding says what's wrong, shows you where it is, and tells you what it should say instead. It's written so you can forward the whole thing to whoever maintains the site without having to explain any of it. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.
Findings — ordered by what each one is costing you
Critical01every page on the site
Your site stops people zooming in. On a phone, the text is the size it is.
There's a single line in the head of every page telling the browser to refuse pinch-to-zoom. It's a default that shipped with a lot of website templates years ago and it's still in yours.
Most of your customers are homeowners deciding on a project that costs thousands of dollars, and a good share of them are over fifty. Someone who can't quite read your service list can't make it bigger. They don't email to tell you the text is small — they go back to the search results and click the next contractor.
In the head of every page
currently
<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width,
initial-scale=1.0,
maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0" />
should be
<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width,
initial-scale=1" />
The fix
Delete maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0 from that line. Nothing else about your layout changes — the page already resizes correctly, it's only the zoom that's been switched off.
Whoever maintains the site will know where this lives; on most themes it's one field in the settings. Ask them to check it on every page template, not just the homepage.
About 5 minutes
Critical02contact page
Your phone number on the contact page can't be tapped.
The number is displayed large and clearly — it's a heading, in fact, the most prominent thing on the page. But it's only text. There is no phone link behind it anywhere on that page, so tapping it on a mobile does nothing at all.
Your homepage has a working phone link. The contact page doesn't. That's the page a ready customer navigates to specifically because they've decided to get in touch, and it's the one page where calling you takes copying the number out by hand.
Phone links found per page
homepage 1 phone link — works
contact page 0 phone links — none at all
the number is a plain heading
The fix
Wrap the number on the contact page in a phone link, the same way the homepage does it. Written out in full with the country code, no brackets and no spaces: tel:+1███████████.
Then open the contact page on an actual phone and tap the number. If the dialler comes up with the right digits, it's done.
About 5 minutes
High03footer, every page
Your footer says 2016.
It sits at the bottom of every page: © Copyright 2016. Ten years behind.
The footer is where a cautious homeowner looks when they're trying to work out whether a business is still trading — especially one they're about to hand several thousand dollars to. A date that old reads as a site nobody has opened in a decade, whatever the rest of the page says.
Footer line, as published today
© Copyright 2016: █████████ ██, Inc.
All rights reserved.
should read
© Copyright 2026: █████████ ██, Inc.
All rights reserved.
The fix
Change the year. Then ask whoever maintains the site to make it update itself — on your platform that's a one-line change, and it means this can never go stale again.
About 5 minutes
High04homepage, mid-page section
A section of your homepage is headed "New For 2021!"
What's under it is good — it's genuinely one of the better things on the site. The heading is the problem: it's advertising as new something that has been there for five years.
This is the same failure as the footer, but worse, because the footer is small print and this is a headline. It tells a visitor exactly how long it's been since anyone looked at this page.
Section heading, as published
New For 2021! ← still on the homepage in 2026
The fix
Take the year out of the heading entirely. Say what the thing is instead of when it arrived — a heading that names the service can't expire, and it tells the reader something useful in the same breath.
About 2 minutes
High05what Google shows in results
Your homepage carries two search descriptions and the first one is blank.
The description is the grey line of text under your business name in Google's results. Your homepage has two of these tags in its code. The first is empty; the second is the real one, and it's decent.
Which one gets used isn't up to you. When Google reads the empty one first it can decide you haven't written a description at all and pull two random sentences off the page instead — which is how a contractor ends up with a search result that opens mid-sentence.
Both description tags, in the order they appear
first <meta name="description"
content="" /> ← empty
second <meta name="description"
content="Landscape design and
installation voted Top Three
in ████ ... " />
The fix
Delete the empty one and keep the written one. It's usually a leftover from an SEO plugin and the theme both trying to write the description — turning it off in one of the two clears it.
While you're there: trim the written one so it ends on a full sentence. Google cuts these at about 155 characters and yours currently gets chopped.
About 10 minutes
Medium06homepage, four consecutive sections
Four headings in a row read "Another", "Yet Another", and "And Yet Another".
You have four project videos on the homepage, one after the other. The first is introduced properly. The next three are headed as though you'd run out of patience writing them.
The videos themselves are the strongest content on the site — real projects, your own crews. The headings make them look like filler, and a visitor skimming down the page reads the headings, not the videos.
The four headings, in page order
1 "[video] Shows Your Project
Before You Start!"
2 "Another [video]!"
3 "Yet Another [video]!"
4 "And Yet Another [video]!"
The fix
Give each one the name of the job it shows — the street, the neighbourhood, or the work itself. "Back garden regrade and retaining wall" tells a visitor something. "Yet Another" tells them you stopped caring three headings ago.
About 15 minutes
Medium07top menu, every page
Your website's admin login is a link in the public menu.
Along the top bar, next to Privacy Policy, there's a link marked Log In. It goes to the administrator sign-in page for your website. Every visitor sees it, and so does every automated bot that reads your site looking for exactly that.
It isn't an emergency — the page is password-protected. But it advertises what your site is built on and where to knock, and it does nothing for the homeowner reading your menu. You can reach that page perfectly well by typing the address; it doesn't need to be in the menu.
Public menu, top bar
menu item 1 Privacy Policy
→ /privacy-policy/
menu item 2 Log In
→ /wp-login.php
← the admin sign-in page
The fix
Remove the Log In item from the menu. Bookmark the address in your own browser instead. If you'd like to go further, ask whoever maintains the site to move the sign-in page to a non-obvious address — that's a small plugin and about ten minutes.
About 5 minutes
Medium08two service pages
One of your service pages exists twice, and the copy has a "-2" on the end.
There are two pages covering the same service. The second has the same address as the first with -2 stuck on the end — the name a website builder gives a page automatically when you create one that clashes with an existing name.
When somebody searches for that service in your area, Google has to pick which of the two to show, and splits the credit between them rather than giving it all to one.
Two addresses, one service
/services-███████-███████/ ← keep this one
/services-███████-███████-2/ ← the duplicate
The fix
Decide which page is the better one, move anything worth saving out of the other, then delete it and forward its address to the one you kept.
One thing to pass on: don't just unpublish the duplicate. Unpublished pages often sit in Google for months. Deleting it with a forward — your web person will call it a redirect — is what actually merges the two.
About 30 minutes
Low09anywhere your link gets shared
When someone shares your website, it arrives as a bare link with no picture.
Sites tell Facebook, Instagram and text messaging what picture and headline to show when someone pastes the link. Yours doesn't have any of those instructions — not one.
So when a happy customer recommends you in a neighbourhood group, their post is a naked web address. The version with a photo of your work and your business name gets read; the bare link mostly doesn't. This is free referral traffic arriving badly dressed.
Sharing tags found on the homepage
og:title missing
og:description missing
og:image missing
← no picture, so a shared
post shows none
The fix
Add three lines to the homepage: a title, one sentence, and a photograph. Pick your best finished project, in landscape, at least 1200 pixels wide.
Most SEO plugins have a tab for this called "social" or "sharing" — it's filling in a form, not writing code.
About 20 minutes
Low10homepage
Your phone number is written three different ways on one page.
Three formats, all on the homepage. A human reads all three as the same number, and it makes no difference to anyone dialling it.
It matters in one narrow place: search engines match your business across Google, Yelp and the rest partly by comparing the phone number character for character. Consistency there is free, and this is the cheapest item on the list.
Formats found, same page
header (███)███-████ ← no space
body copy (███) ███-████ ← with space
footer ███.███.████ ← dots
The fix
Pick one written form — whichever appears on your Google Business listing — and use it everywhere on the site, brackets and spacing included.
About 10 minutes
If you only do some of it, do it in this order
- Delete the zoom lock from the viewport line5 min · critical
- Put a phone link on the contact page number5 min · critical
- Change the footer year, and make it self-update5 min · high
- Take “2021” out of the homepage heading2 min · high
- Delete the empty search description tag10 min · high
- Rename the four video headings15 min · medium
- Remove the Log In item from the public menu5 min · medium
- Merge the duplicate service page and forward it30 min · medium
- Add sharing title, text and image to the homepage20 min · low
- Settle on one phone number format10 min · low
The first five come to about twenty-five minutes and cover everything that is actively costing you calls. The rest can wait for a wet afternoon.
If anything here doesn't make sense, reply to the email this came in on. You'll get me, not a support queue, and there's nothing else I'll try to sell you.
Jordan William
Apex Site Audits — Apex Sniper Developments
190 Harvest Park Circle, Calgary, Alberta, Canada