Grade your own pages the way we do.
Every page either helps someone act, or gets in the way
There is no neutral page. A page that does not move someone forward is costing you the traffic you sent to it.
The trouble with auditing your own site is that you built it, so you know where everything is. You cannot un-know that. The scorecard exists to force the judgement out of your head and onto paper, where a low number is harder to argue with than a feeling.
Score each key page on three lenses. Anything under 4 out of 5 is where you are leaking, and the lowest single score across the whole grid is where you start.
The three lenses
Friction. How easy is the one action?
Count the taps, count the fields, count the decisions. Baymard Institute's checkout research, built on hundreds of thousands of hours of usability testing across 327 top-grossing sites, found the average checkout carries 11.3 form fields, that 17% of people have abandoned because the process felt too complicated, and, most usefully, that the number of fields matters more than the number of steps.
That applies well beyond checkout. Spreading a request across two calm screens costs you almost nothing. Asking for two more things costs you a lot. 5 = effortless: one obvious action, nothing asked that is not needed.
Clarity. Do they get it in five seconds?
Not "is the information present". Is it understood, by someone who has never heard of you, on a phone, in a hurry, half-reading. One message, plain words, no jargon, no cleverness that needs a second pass. 5 = instantly clear who it is for and what happens next.
Proof. Do they believe you?
Everything you claim, someone else in your market also claims. Proof is the part they cannot copy: real names, real numbers, real faces, positioned next to the moment of doubt rather than parked on a testimonials page nobody visits. 5 = fully convinced by the time they reach the ask.
How to score honestly
The temptation is to give your own homepage a 4 because you made it. Three things that help.
Score it as a stranger, on a phone. Open the page on your own phone, not your desktop. Most of the friction you cannot see lives there.
Use the five-second rule literally. Open the page, count to five, close it. Now write down what you think it does and who it is for. Better still, get someone outside the business to do it. Their answer is your Clarity score, not your opinion of your own copy.
Score the page you actually send traffic to. Not the one you are proudest of.
What each score means
| Score | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Working. A stranger acts without thinking. | Leave it. Go and fix something else. |
| 4 | Good. One small thing gets in the way. | Fix it when you are next in there. |
| 3 | Mediocre. A motivated person converts, a curious one does not. | Worth a focused hour. |
| 2 | Losing people. The page is working against you. | Rebuild the section, not the wording. |
| 1 | Actively costing money. | Stop sending traffic here until it is fixed. |
Score your key pages
Give each page 1 to 5 on each lens. List the pages you actually send traffic to: home, your main service page, contact or booking, and any page an ad or a search result lands on.
| Page | Friction | Clarity | Proof | Total /15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | ||||
| Main service | ||||
| Contact / booking | ||||
| Top landing page | ||||
Reading your scores
13 to 15. Working. Leave it alone.
9 to 12. One lens is dragging the total down. Find the lowest of the three and fix only that. Do not redesign a page scoring 11, you will usually make it worse.
Under 9. Rebuild the page around the one action you want, rather than patching it. A page scoring 8 has a structural problem, and structural problems do not respond to better copy.
The rule. Fix the lowest single number on the whole grid first, not the lowest total. A page scoring 5, 5, 1 is losing people for one specific reason, and that reason is cheaper to fix than a page scoring 3, 3, 3 is to rescue.
The fixes, by lens
Low Friction score. Cut fields before you cut steps, per the Baymard finding. Remove every field you do not use within a week of receiving it. Put the main action where a thumb lands. Delete the second call to action competing with the first.
Low Clarity score. Rewrite the first line to say who it is for and what they get, in the words your customer uses rather than your industry's. Remove the hero image if it is decorative. Cut anything that needs reading twice.
Low Proof score. Move your best proof next to the ask rather than further down the page. Swap a wall of testimonials for one specific story with a number in it. Add real faces and real names where you have permission. Publish ratios and percentages, never a client's private revenue.
Do this again in ninety days
Scores drift. Someone adds a field, a plugin adds a popup, a well-meant update pushes proof below the fold.
Keep this page. Re-score the same rows in three months and compare. The pages that slipped will tell you more about how your site is actually maintained than any analytics dashboard will.
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“The analytics are set up so I can see who's been on my website, when are they on, what stage are they on. And then it's all connected to my booking system.”
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