What makes a good website, and the 98 checks I use to prove it

You can test your own website against the six jobs with nothing more than your phone and a browser, one short check per job. Count your no answers as you go.

More than five years of building websites taught me most of these lessons the expensive way. In 2026 I started writing each one down as a check that runs on its own, so a mistake I'd already made once couldn't reach another client's site. I build in code with Claude Code, and the checks are small programs that read the finished site the way a browser and a search engine would.

Most of them run every time I change a site. Some run only where they apply, like on a blog or a page that shows a review count, and a few run before or after launch, like the redirect map when a site moves over from a platform like Squarespace.

Design has the most checks, 24, because it has the most ways to quietly go wrong, one card or one button at a time. The seventh row isn't one of the six jobs, because its 14 checks are there to make sure the site that goes live is the one you approved.

A website is fast on a phone when its main content shows up within 2.5 seconds on a normal mobile connection, which is the mark Google's own guidance calls good, and the main photo is usually what decides it. So being mobile friendly takes more than a layout that fits a small screen, and the photo itself has to be light enough to reach mobile devices quickly.

I ran Google's PageSpeed test on the homepages of the 11 live custom sites I manage in October 2026. Laptops scored close to perfect and phones trailed, which is true of almost every website and the reason phone speed gets its own 8 checks.

A settlement company's site asked Google Fonts for its typeface with one small mistake in how the request listed the font's styles. Google refused it, the browser quietly fell back to Georgia, and every page showed the wrong type for four days, through several reviews, because nothing on screen looked broken. Now a check confirms that every font a page asks for actually loads.

Google and AI assistants can find a website when each page carries labels in its code that say what the page is about, links to the pages related to it, and passages that answer a question on their own. None of that shows on screen, which is exactly why it gets skipped, and a page search engines can't read has a hard time showing up in search results. Getting found is 16 checks of that plumbing.

For AI answers, every FAQ answer on my sites has to make sense with no question printed above it, because an assistant lifts the answer on its own and leaves the heading behind. I also keep a plain list of every page for AI tools to read, called llms.txt, and a check fails when a page is missing from it. If your site isn't getting found at all, my post on why your website is not showing up on Google goes through the causes one by one.

Not on every site, and you can't tell by looking, because a contact form can look perfect, show a thank you message and still never deliver a thing. Nothing shows an error when a record is simply never written, so nobody notices. Lead delivery has 15 checks, more than any job except design and getting found.

Confirmation emails that invite a reply have to come from an address that can receive mail, or a customer's reply bounces and nobody ever sees it. Every lead also has to carry the page and the channel it came from, whether that's Google, an ad or social media, all the way to the inbox and the spreadsheet, so an owner can see which pages bring in business.

I wrote more on what to do once the lead lands in my lead follow up post.

Everyone can read and use a site when it's easy to navigate for someone in bright sunlight, someone using a screen reader and someone who just wants to tap a button and have it work the first time. That's what user friendly means in practice, and on a small business site it's most of what a good user experience comes down to. I'd rather measure it than assume it, so these 10 checks run in a real browser at phone and desktop sizes, where the problems actually show up.

Everything on a great website is true, which means it only promises what the business can back up. If the owner hasn't confirmed same-day service, a response time or a guarantee, it doesn't go on the page, and a check scans every page for those promises. Honesty has 11 checks, and my own site has needed the same fixes.

My site said custom sites like mine test in the 90s on Google's PageSpeed tool. That was true on desktop and not on phones, and the sentence didn't say which. I changed it to name the device and the date, and removed a comparison to other people's sites I had never measured.

The writing gets checked too. One check asks whether a sentence could move to another business's website unchanged, and flags the page when too many could, because generic copy is the quickest way to sound like everyone else.

What makes a good website design is consistency more than any single flourish, so the layout you approved looks the same on every page and at every screen size. Responsive design means the layout works at every width, and the 24 design checks measure the finished page in a real browser at phone and desktop widths to prove it.

One of them came from my own review of seven new pages. Six of my 23 notes were the same problem in different places: a section centered everything except one row of buttons or one card, which sat stuck to the left, and every check had passed.

The website that goes live is the one you approved only when the settings files the host reads get checked too, because some problems show up at the moment a site goes live and nowhere before it. These 14 checks make sure the site that reaches your customers is the one you signed off on.

Automated website checks can't judge whether a page sounds like the business, speaks to its target audience or simply looks right, which is why every page also gets four reviews by judgment before it goes live. Sixteen checks once passed on a page I rejected the moment I opened it.

Whoever wrote the copy is never the only one who judges it. A separate review reads it fresh, and it's allowed to say a page passes every rule and still looks wrong.

When website checks get written faster than they reach every site, the newest sites get the newest protection and the older ones fall behind. In early October 2026 I found I'd been doing exactly that. Each new check went to a client site only once that site already passed it, so a check that would have flagged a problem got parked instead. Some client sites ended up between 12 and 56 checks behind.

I caught those sites up and changed how a check reaches them, so it can't pile up again.

A well built website costs more because building it this way takes a while, and that time is the reason it works. Each change runs every check that site carries, a failure gets fixed instead of waved through, and every page still gets the four reviews by judgment on top.

Most of what you pay for in a well built website is work you never see. Every main photo gets converted so the page stays fast on a phone, my monitoring sends test leads through the live forms on most of the sites I manage so I know they still deliver, and anything the owner can't confirm stays off the site.

If you want the numbers, my breakdown of how much a website costs for a small business lays them out, and my small business website design page shows what goes into a site I build. If you already have a site, my post on website redesign cost tells the full story of the redirect loop above.