Check Your Website Actually Works Before You Buy More Traffic

You can pour money into ads, but if your site is broken, slow, or painful on a phone, that traffic leaks right back out. The good news: most of these checks are free, and most are fast. Here's how to make sure your site actually works before you spend another dollar sending people to it.

This is part of the "Does It Even Work" mini-series. The order matters. Fix the site first, then buy the traffic.

Find the Broken Links That Make You Look Unsafe

The problem: A dead link or a button that goes nowhere makes people uneasy, even if they couldn't tell you why. And uneasy people don't buy. You won't catch these by clicking around once, because your own pages load from memory.

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. It's free for up to 500 URLs, no signup.
3. Start with your main menu and your checkout. Those matter most.
4. Then open your site on your phone and walk the whole buy path yourself, all the way through, to make sure it actually goes through.

Fix a Slow Site Before It Costs You Sales

The problem: Every extra second your site takes to load, a few more people give up, and you never see them go. It's easy to assume you're fine because it loads fast at your desk. But that's not where your customers are.

Google's research with SOASTA found that as a mobile page goes from one second to ten seconds to load, the chance a visitor bounces jumps 123%.

The fix:

1. Run your page through PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse. Both are free from Google.
2. They give you a score and a list of what's slowing things down, usually big images or heavy scripts, worst first.
3. Fix the top item.
4. Check it the way a customer would. On your phone, on regular data, not your fast home wifi.

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

The problem: Your customers shop on a phone, one-handed, on the couch. You build and check your site on a big laptop screen, so you never feel what they feel.

About half of US online shopping now happens on phones. Mobile is around 45% of US ecommerce and climbing toward half, per eMarketer. That friction on a small screen is where mobile sales quietly die.

The fix:

1. Pick up your phone and walk the whole buy path. Home, product, add to cart, checkout.
2. Notice every spot you have to pinch, zoom, or tap something twice.
3. Check whether the buy button is even reachable with your thumb.

Fix the worst one, then walk it again.

Make Sure Google Knows What Your Page Is About

The problem: Search traffic is free, but only if Google can understand what your page is actually about. You don't fix that by cramming in keywords.

Most pages never get there. An Ahrefs study of about 14 billion pages found that 96.55% get zero traffic from Google. A clear, well-labeled page is how you land in the small slice that does.

The fix:

1. Paste your page into a reasoning model. Ask it to read the page like a search engine would, then tell you what it thinks the page is about and what someone might type to find it.
2. If that doesn't match what you actually sell, your title and headings are sending the wrong signal. Tidy those up.
3. Then go search your own product in Google and see if you even show up.

Check What AI Says About Your Brand

The problem: More shoppers skip Google and just ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "is this store legit?" or "best [your product] brands?" So it matters what those tools actually know about you.

This isn't a someday thing. Adobe Analytics found that traffic to US retail sites from AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity jumped 693% year over year during the 2025 holidays, and 81% of shoppers who used an AI assistant said it made shopping better.

The fix:

1. Ask each tool: "What do you know about [your brand]? What do they sell, who's it for, and what do people say?"
2. If the answer is wrong, thin, or empty, that's roughly what it's telling your shoppers too.
3. The fix is clear product pages, real reviews, and an about page that plainly says what you do, so the machines can read you.

Quick Recap

• Broken links make a store feel unsafe. A free checker finds them. Start with your menu and checkout.
• A slow site loses people you never see. PageSpeed Insights tells you the top thing to fix.
• About half of US online shopping is on phones. Walk your own buy path on yours.
• Most pages get no Google traffic. Ask AI what your page looks like to a search engine.
• Shoppers ask AI about brands now. Check what it says about yours.

Start Here

If you're not sure which check to run first, that's the most common starting point. It helps to know where your site is actually losing people before you pay for more of them.

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 25-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/