You do not choose which page someone lands on. Search does. So every page has to work on its own, whether it is the homepage, a service page or a blog post from two years ago.
I work with two kinds of client. Startups with an idea and no website, and established businesses with a website nobody finds. The fix is the same in both cases: work out what each page is for, then make sure it does that job quickly and clearly.
Visibility is four things, not one
When someone says they want to be more visible, they usually mean ranking higher on Google. That is one part of it. The full picture is whether you appear in search results, whether your Google Business Profile matches your site, whether the page loads before the visitor gives up, and whether they can tell what you do within a few seconds of arriving.
Missing any one of those wastes the other three. Ranking first is worth nothing if the page takes six seconds to load on a mobile connection.
Speed is measurable, and it is ranked
Google measures three things and calls them Core Web Vitals. How long the main content takes to appear, how quickly the page responds when you tap something, and whether the layout jumps around while it loads. They are part of the ranking system and you can test your own site against them in seconds with PageSpeed Insights.
The usual causes of a bad score are predictable. Uncompressed images, a page that has to run a large amount of JavaScript before it shows anything, fonts loading late, and third party scripts for chat widgets, analytics and ads. On a static or server rendered site, most of that disappears.
| Metric | What it measures | Pass mark | Usual cause of failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | How long the main content takes to appear | Under 2.5s | Uncompressed images, slow server, render-blocking scripts |
| INP | How quickly the page responds when tapped | Under 200ms | Too much JavaScript running on the main thread |
| CLS | Whether the layout jumps while loading | Under 0.1 | Images without dimensions, fonts swapping late, injected banners |
Every page is a landing page
Because you do not control the entry point, every page needs the basics: what you do, where you work, and how to get in touch. Your about page needs a call to action. Your blog posts need to link to your services. Your service pages need to link to each other.
Internal linking helps search engines understand which pages matter and how they relate, and it helps visitors find the thing next to what they came for. Both reasons are worth the ten minutes it takes.
Accessibility is not an extra
This is where otherwise decent sites fail. Low contrast text, buttons too small to hit with a thumb, forms with no labels, images with no alt text, video that plays automatically with no way to stop it.
Around one in five people in the UK has a disability. Some of them are trying to use your site right now. Beyond that, the same fixes help everyone: contrast helps someone reading outdoors, large tap targets help someone on a moving bus, clear labels help someone tired at 11pm. Screen readers and search crawlers also read a page in similar ways, so accessible markup is better for SEO as a side effect. I build this in as standard rather than quoting it separately.
How people read a page
Most visitors scan rather than read. They start at the top, move down, stop at headings and buttons, and leave if nothing matches what they came for.
So headings need to say something specific. Our Services tells a visitor nothing. Emergency roof repairs across North London tells them everything and matches what they typed into Google. The same applies to buttons: Submit describes the form, Get a quote describes the outcome.
What I do about it
I start with an audit. Not a fifty page report. A list of what is slow, what is broken, what search engines cannot read, and what is costing enquiries, in the order I would fix it.
Sometimes the answer is a rebuild. Often it is three fixes on the site you already have. I will tell you which, including when the honest answer is that you do not need me yet.
Send me your website address and I will tell you what is slowing it down and what is costing you enquiries.
Get a straight answerStraight answers
- Do I need a new website or can the current one be fixed?
- Most of the time the current one is fine and the problem is speed, structure or search visibility. Those are fixable in place and cost far less than a rebuild. A rebuild is worth it when the site runs on a platform you cannot control or when the code is too far gone to work on safely.
- How long before changes show up?
- Speed and navigation fixes change visitor behaviour the same day. Search rankings move over weeks to months, depending on the competition for the terms you want.
- Does page speed affect Google rankings?
- Yes. Core Web Vitals, which measure loading speed, responsiveness and layout stability, are part of how Google ranks pages. They also affect conversion directly, because visitors leave slow pages before they read anything.
- Is accessibility work worth paying for?
- Yes. The same work that helps a screen reader user helps anyone on a phone, on a poor connection or in bright sunlight, and it improves how search engines read the page. Around one in five people in the UK has a disability, so it is also a straightforward commercial argument.