How do you check whether the site is too slow?
With a performance test in mobile mode, not on your computer. Your site always looks fast on your machine, on your connection, with everything cached; that impression is why so many speed problems never get noticed.
The indicator that correlates most with abandonment is how long the main block of content takes to appear. Past a few seconds, a measurable share of visits leaves before seeing anything. And the effect compounds: you lose paid traffic you already bought.
What does the first screen reveal?
A brutal, free test: show your home page to someone outside the business for five seconds and ask them to tell you what you do and who you serve.
If they cannot, no later optimization matters. The typical failure is not design but copy: headlines describing aspirations — “we transform your business” — instead of saying what you do. A visitor who does not understand what you sell does not bounce because the site is ugly; they bounce because they did not find the answer they came for.
How much friction does your form have?
Every extra field lowers the number of people who complete it. The question that settles the argument is: do I need this information to reply, or do I want it to qualify?
What you need to reply to a first contact is usually a name, an email, and a description of the problem. Budget, company size, and job title are qualifying data: valuable to your sales team, expensive in conversion. Asking for them at first contact hands the visitor the job of qualifying themselves before they know whether you are interesting.
Are you measuring conversions or only visits?
It is surprisingly common to have analytics installed and no conversion event configured at all. You know how many people arrive and not how many do anything.
The viable minimum is three things: how many forms get submitted, which channel each visitor came from, and which pages they saw before converting. Without that, any decision about the site — or about the ad spend feeding it — is made blind, and the argument about what to improve gets settled by opinion.
Does your content exist for someone who does not run JavaScript?
This is the least known sign and the one whose importance has changed most lately. If the content describing your services is inserted into the page by JavaScript, traditional search engines generally process it, but answer-engine crawlers frequently do not run scripts: to them that part of your site is empty.
It takes a minute to check by fetching the page with a command-line tool and looking for whether your services text appears in the raw HTML. If it does not, this is not a ranking problem: you do not exist for that channel.
How do you prioritize what to fix first?
By opportunity cost, not by ease. The order that tends to pay most is: first what stops people finding or understanding you — invisible content, a confused message; then what makes them leave — speed, form friction; and last what stops you improving — missing measurement.
That order is counterintuitive, because measurement feels like it should come first. But measuring a site that does not communicate what it does only tells you precisely that it does not convert. That full diagnosis is what we deliver in a Digital Audit, with the findings ranked by impact rather than by technical order.