Check Your Website Works Before You Buy More Traffic

You have the ad budget sitting there and the campaign more or less ready. Maybe a $50 boosted post, maybe a real Meta campaign.

Before you turn it on, one thing worth knowing about how these break. On my own store, the button that said "Add kit to my cart" pointed at dailypawblog.store. The real storefront is thedailypawblog.store. One missing "the." Anybody who tapped it got ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT where the cart should have been, while the site itself looked healthy: pages loaded, nothing in the admin flagged a thing. A one-line curl -sI against the URL sitting inside that button was what turned it up.

That's the shape of what you're checking for. Ad money buys clicks on one link, on one page, from someone holding a phone who has never seen your site. That single path can be broken while everything around it looks right.

So here are the five checks I run before I send anyone to a page I'm paying for, all free. Part of the "Does It Even Work" mini-series, all of it before the ad money moves.

Find the Broken Links That Make You Look Unsafe

The problem: You click your own links all day and they work, partly because your browser cached those pages the last thirty times.

There's a second kind of broken that no checker will flag. A link can return a clean HTTP 200 and still show a stranger a login screen or an empty placeholder. The server answered, so the crawler is satisfied, and you're signed in, so it looks right to you. Demos, dashboards, anything behind an account — that's where this hides, and it's usually the page meant to close the sale.

The fix:

1. Run your site through a free broken-link checker.
2. If you have a developer, Screaming Frog's SEO Spider crawls every link at once, free up to 500 URLs.
3. Start with your main menu and your checkout.
4. Then open the link to whatever you charge the most for and look at what renders. A green status code only means the server answered.
5. Do that part in a private window, signed out. That's the version your ad traffic gets.
6. Check the links that live outside your site too: your ad, your bio, your email footer. No crawler touches those, and they're what you're paying to send people through.

Fix a Slow Site Before It Costs You Sales

The problem: Your site is fast for you: home wifi, and half the page already cached from yesterday.

Two things decide whether a stranger waits: how long the biggest thing on the screen takes to appear, and whether the layout jumps while they reach for a button. Pageview counts tell you neither. Google's research with SOASTA priced the gap — as a mobile page goes from one second to ten seconds to load, the chance a visitor bounces jumps 123%.

The fix:

1. Run the page through PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse. Both are free from Google.
2. You get a worst-first list of what's slowing it down, usually big images or heavy scripts.
3. Fix the top item, then run it again. The list re-sorts once the biggest thing is gone, and what was second often stops mattering.
4. Then load it on your phone on cell data.

The score at the top isn't the thing to chase. A page can sit at 70 and feel instant, or hit 90 and still shift under a thumb. Read the items.

Test Your Site the Way Customers Use It: On a Phone

The problem: Your customer is one-handed on a couch with the TV going. You built the thing on a laptop.

Your analytics will usually hide this. Unless your conversion events record device type, and something measures how far down each page people get, a phone visitor who gave up at payment looks identical to one who never arrived. That's a blind spot over roughly half your traffic — mobile runs around 45% of US ecommerce and is climbing toward half, per eMarketer.

The fix:

1. Walk the whole buy path on your phone. Home, product, add to cart, checkout, payment.
2. Turn wifi off first. Cell data is the connection your ad traffic shows up on.
3. Notice every spot you have to pinch, zoom, or tap something twice.
4. Check whether the buy button is even reachable with your thumb.
5. Go all the way through a real payment on your own card, then refund yourself. Test mode won't catch a wallet button that fails on iOS.

Fix the worst one, then walk it again.

Make Sure Google Knows What Your Page Is About

The problem: Google works out what your page is about from the words on it, which might be something you didn't intend.

You don't need a paid rank tracker for this. Google Search Console is free on any property you own, and its queries report is the closest thing to Google telling you in its own words what it thinks your page is for. Set expectations before you look: Ahrefs checked about 14 billion pages and found 96.55% get zero traffic from Google. Barely any impressions is ordinary, and it means your ad traffic is the only traffic that page gets for now.

The fix:

1. Paste your page text into Claude or ChatGPT Thinking and ask it:

   "Read this page as a search engine would. What is this page about, who is it for, and what would someone type into Google to find it?"

2. If the answer doesn't match what you sell, your title and headings are sending the wrong signal. Those two carry most of the weight, so start there.

3. Then search your own product in Google and see if you show up.

Check What AI Says About Your Brand

The problem: Some of your shoppers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "is this store legit?" before they ever load your site, so what those tools know about you decides whether the visit happens.

Enough shoppers do this now to move real numbers: over the 2025 holidays, Adobe Analytics measured traffic to US retail sites arriving from AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity up 693% year over year.

Run the check on your own brand and read the answer literally. I asked Perplexity "What is The Daily Paw Blog? What do they sell?" and got back: "The search results do not show a site or company called 'The Daily Paw Blog' as a distinct, recognizable brand." Then it guessed — a handful of real businesses with names close to mine, none of them me. That's the failure mode. An assistant with nothing to go on hands the shopper the nearest thing it can find, which is somebody else's store.

The fix:

1. Ask each tool: "What do you know about [your brand]? What do they sell and who's it for?"
2. Ask in a fresh chat with memory off, or you'll get what the tool remembers about you instead of what a stranger sees.
3. A wrong or empty answer is roughly what your shoppers get too.
4. Make your product pages and your about page say plainly what you sell and who it's for. Your brand name and a plain description of the product belong in the same sentence, as text on the page.
5. Ask again a few weeks after you change the wording; these tools update on their own schedule.

Quick Recap

• My buy button pointed one character off from the real domain. Check where yours goes.
• A clean HTTP 200 can sit in front of a login screen. Open the link to your most expensive thing.
• PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse names the top thing slowing you down. Fix that one.
• Walk your own buy path on your phone, on cell data, through payment.
• Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity what they know about your brand — some shoppers ask them first.

Start Here

If you run these and find something you can't fix yourself, that's normal — most of what I described took a real debugging session to track down.

At daisyguti.ai/work-with-me, there's an AI intake assessment that maps where your business stands before any call. It takes a few minutes and gives you a clear read on what to fix first. Daisy is a 20+ year engineer who builds these systems for small business owners, so the assessment reflects how real sites run.

Sources

1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free for up to 500 URLs - https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
2. Think with Google / SOASTA, mobile page speed benchmarks (1s to 10s = +123% bounce probability) - https://business.google.com/ca-en/think/marketing-strategies/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/
3. Google Lighthouse, free and open-source - https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview
4. eMarketer mobile commerce share, via MobiLoud - https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-commerce-statistics
5. Ahrefs, 96.55% of pages get zero traffic from Google - https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/
6. Adobe Analytics via Digital Commerce 360, generative-AI shopping traffic up 693% - https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/01/13/generative-ai-online-holiday-shopping-traffic-2025/