What I found when I finally went through my own site the way I’d go through a client’s.
When was the last time you actually looked at your website?
Not glanced at your homepage on your phone while you were waiting for coffee.
Not fixed the one thing that’s been quietly bugging you since spring.
I mean really went through it … page by page, reading the actual words, clicking every link, looking at it the way a stranger would.
If you can’t remember … yep, been there too.
For months, my own website had been sitting firmly in the “I’ll get to that next” category. I wasn’t completely ignoring it. I’d update a sentence here, swap something out there, fix the occasional thing that caught my attention. So in my head, I was maintaining it.
Then I had a reason to look at it differently.
I was preparing to give a presentation to a group of fellow business owners, and as a thank you for attending, I planned to share a few resources from my website. I knew that meant there would probably be an influx of people visiting my site after hearing me speak.
And suddenly, I had a thought that made my chest tighten a little:
They’re going to hear me explain what I do in the room … and then they’re going to go to my website. Do those two experiences actually match?
So I did what I’d been saying I would do “next” for months. I sat down and went through the whole thing.
Every page. Every link. Every form. Every service. Every awkward little corner I normally skim past because I’ve seen it approximately four thousand times.
And well … it was humbling, to say the least.
I found broken links. Formatting issues. Old offers. Language describing a version of my business I’d already moved past. I even found a testimonial from a client I genuinely adore saying that working with me helped her “gain charity.”
Charity. Not clarity. Charity.
For God only knows how long. 😬
But as cringeworthy as some of those things were, the broken stuff wasn’t really what bothered me. Most of that took a few minutes to fix. The bigger realization was that my website no longer sounded like the business I was actually running.
The Problem You Assume You Have
When something about your website feels a little off, it’s easy to assume the problem is sitting right there on the surface.
Maybe there’s a link that needs to be updated. Maybe the design is starting to feel dated. Maybe you need new photography, or there’s a section of copy you’ve been meaning to rewrite for six months.
And sure, sometimes those things are part of it. But sometimes the bigger problem is that your business has grown and evolved … and your website hasn’t fully caught up.
That’s what I realized when I finally sat down and looked at mine.
Over the past few years, I’ve refined the way I talk about my work, simplified my offers, gotten much clearer about who I want to serve, and stopped feeling like I need to prove I can do all the things for all the people. If you ask me what I do, who I help, or how I’m different, I can explain it pretty easily.
But putting all of that into writing and making sure it actually shows up clearly across an entire website? That’s different.
I actually think this is one of the most normal parts of running a service business. Client work has deadlines and people expecting things. Your inbox has actual humans in it. Your own website has … you. Whenever you get to it. And because you’re probably making little changes along the way, it doesn’t necessarily feel neglected. You changed that button last month. You updated a photo. You fixed the paragraph that had been bugging you.
The problem is, your business doesn’t usually change in one dramatic moment. It changes slowly. You get better at explaining what you do. You refine your offers. You learn which clients are the best fit. You notice what people value most about working with you. You have conversations, make decisions, and sharpen your thinking along the way.
Meanwhile, your website gets updated in little pieces.
That’s exactly what had happened to mine. It had been Frankensteined together through years of tiny changes. A sentence updated here. A new offer added there. A photo swapped out. A page tweaked because something shifted in the business. Every individual update made sense when I made it, but I hadn’t stepped back in a long time to look at whether all of those pieces still made sense together.
And that was the real gap I found. My business had been evolving, but my website hadn’t kept up.
Why You Genuinely Can’t See It
You already know how hard it is to proofread your own writing. You read what you meant to write instead of what’s actually sitting on the page. Your brain helpfully fills in the intention and glides right past the gap.
Your website works the same way, except there’s another layer when you’re a service provider. When you sell a product, there’s some natural distance between you and the thing you’re describing. When you sell a service, you’re trying to explain how you think, how you solve problems, what it’s like to work with you, and why any of that matters. You’re about as close to the thing you’re trying to describe as it possibly gets.
Which is exactly how you can read your own homepage a hundred times and never notice that the way you naturally explain your work on a call doesn’t appear anywhere on it.
That was probably the biggest realization for me. I had clear messaging for my business. I knew what I wanted to say, and I could say it easily out loud. I had just assumed more of that clarity had made its way onto my website than actually had.
Because here’s the thing:
Having clear messaging and having it on your website are two different things.
That gap can exist even when you’ve done everything right. Maybe especially when you’ve done everything right, because once you’ve figured out your messaging, you tend to assume the hard part is over.
Why This Matters More Than It Used To
Your website is quietly doing more jobs than it was a few years ago, and I don’t think most of us have adjusted for that.
Someone finds you through a search and lands cold, knowing absolutely nothing about you. Someone asks AI a question about a problem they’re having and gets pointed in your direction. Someone got your name from a friend at a networking event and comes to your site to see whether the recommendation holds up before they reply to your email.
Same pages. Very different people, arriving with very different amounts of context, all making a decision about you in a handful of seconds.
Vague copy fails every one of them because each one is trying to answer some version of the same question: Do I understand what this business does, and is it relevant to me?
If the answer isn’t clear, a first-time visitor has a harder time figuring out what you actually do, a search engine has less context for understanding your business, and an AI tool has less useful information to work with when deciding whether your expertise is relevant.
Specific, clear language is the one thing that serves all of them at the same time.
That’s really the whole argument for why this deserves more than a maintenance pass and a couple of link fixes. It’s not about being polished. It’s about being understandable to a stranger who’s giving you about eight seconds.
So if you have a nagging feeling your website could be doing more for you, take a minute to look for the places where your business may have evolved faster than your website has.
Signs Your Website Isn’t Working as Hard as It Could Be
Before you read these: please know that none of them mean you did something wrong. They’re just what naturally happens when a business keeps growing and a website stays exactly where you left it.
- You describe your work differently on a call than you do on your homepage.
Pay attention to this the next time you’re on a discovery call. The way you explain what you do out loud, to an actual human being who’s asking, is almost always sharper and more specific than whatever is on your page. If that clarity isn’t translating to your website, that’s a pretty good sign the written version needs to catch up. - Your About page reflects a business you’ve already moved past.
Nobody sends you a notification when your business evolves. It happens gradually through a hundred small decisions … a service you stopped offering, a type of client you started politely declining, or a part of the work that quietly became your favorite thing. If your About page is still introducing a version of your business from two or three years ago, it may be time to bring it up to date. - The words your clients use about you don’t appear anywhere on your site.
Go back and actually read your testimonials. Your clients are telling you, in their own unprompted language, what they value about working with you. If they’re consistently describing something more specific, meaningful, or compelling than what you’re saying about yourself, there’s probably an opportunity to bring some of that language into your messaging. - You’ve added services over time without revisiting how they fit together.
Every offer probably made sense when you added it, but someone landing on your site doesn’t know the history behind those decisions. They’re just seeing what’s there today. If your offers read more like a running list of things you can do than a clear picture of how you help people, it may be time to step back and look at them as a whole. - You’d write the page differently today than the day you wrote it.
This might be the simplest test of all. Without looking at your website, think about how you’d write your homepage headline, describe your work, or explain your main offer today. If your answer is meaningfully different from what’s currently on the page, your website is probably a few steps behind you.
I’ll be honest with you, I hit four out of five of these on my own site this summer. Four. Out of five. Which is a genuinely strange thing to admit publicly as someone who does this for a living (not gonna lie, still not sure if it was smart to hit “publish” before stripping this part out).
But I’m telling you because I don’t want you reading that list and feeling like you’re behind. This is not a list of failures. This is just what happens when your own marketing lives at the very bottom of the priority list, underneath all the client work you’re actually getting paid to do.
At the end of the day, we’re all human. So the goal isn’t to never drift — it’s just to notice sooner next time.
How To Actually Go Through Your Own Site
Ok, here’s where it gets fun.
*as she claps her hands and starts getting a little giddy*
If you know me at all, you know I’m not going to point out a problem and then leave you there. That “okay, so now what?” moment is basically the whole reason I do this work. Anyone can tell you your messaging is off. The useful part is knowing what to actually do on Monday morning.
So here’s the process I used on my own site, in the order I did it. Maybe you can use this process too (or at least take parts and pieces from it, so you don’t have to learn the hard way like I did).
1. Start with what’s broken, because it requires zero objectivity.
Click every single link. Fill out every form and confirm it actually goes somewhere (I found one that had been quietly going nowhere (NO-WHERE!), which was a fun little discovery). Pull the whole thing up on your phone. Check that your contact information is current and that nothing important is buried three clicks deep.
Start here for two reasons. First, it’s genuinely quick, and you’ll get a real hit of momentum from crossing things off in the first twenty minutes. Second, and more importantly, it clears the surface layer. As long as there’s a broken link nagging at you, that’s all you’ll be able to see. Get it out of the way so you can look at the harder stuff underneath.
💡 Bonus Tip: Here’s the good news about this particular step: it doesn’t have to be you.
This is genuinely the most delegate-able part of the entire process. Clicking links and testing forms doesn’t require any strategic thinking, any context about your business, or any decisions only you can make. It just requires someone paying attention.
I hired my oldest daughter as an admin assistant in my business this summer, and this is exactly the kind of work she took off my plate. And honestly? Having someone else’s eyes on it was SUPER eye opening. She caught things I had scrolled past a hundred times without registering them, because she had no idea what any of it was supposed to say.
So if you’ve got a VA, an assistant, an intern, or a pre-teen looking to make some extra summer money, hand this piece off. AI can help here too, especially with things like checking whether your links resolve or flagging pages that look thin. But there’s something about a real human clicking through your site with fresh eyes that catches the stuff a tool won’t.
2. Before you read a single page, write down how you describe your work right now.
This is the step everyone skips, and it’s the one that makes the entire process work. So, please don’t skip it.
Open a blank document and answer three questions. Say them out loud first if you can, because the spoken version is always better.
- What do I actually do?
- Who do I do it for?
- Why does it matter to them?
Don’t look at your website while you’re doing this. Don’t polish it or make it sound like marketing copy. You want the version you’d say to a friend who asked what you do, not the version you’d write for a homepage.
Now that document is your comparison point, and that’s what changes everything. Without it, you’ll read your site and think “yeah, that’s basically right,” because your brain will obligingly fill in every single thing you meant to say. With it, you’re comparing two actual concrete things instead of comparing your website against a vague feeling.
3. Read your pages out of order.
Start with the page you never look at. You know the one … it’s probably the page you built last and haven’t opened since, or the one you assume nobody visits anyway. Then jump somewhere random from there. Whatever you do, don’t go home, about, services, contact.
Because order is what triggers autocomplete. When you follow your own navigation, you’re walking a path you’ve walked a thousand times, and your brain shifts out of reading mode into something closer to inventory … yep, headline’s there, yep, that’s the photo, yep, buttons in the right spot. You’re confirming things are where you left them, not reading what they say.
💡 Bonus Tip: Copy the text off a page and paste it into a plain document. No fonts, no colors, no photos, no white space doing its job beautifully. Just the words, looking as unflattering as possible.
You’ll be amazed how different your copy reads when the design isn’t quietly propping it up. Good design makes vague language feel intentional … the photography sets a mood, the spacing gives everything room to breathe, and your brain reads all of that as “this page is working.” Strip it away and the words have to stand on their own, which is exactly what they have to do for a search engine, an AI model, and a person skimming on their phone.
That’s where I found most of my real gaps. Not the broken stuff or the typos … just sentences that looked perfectly fine on a nicely designed page and said absolutely nothing in a plain doc.
And if you can stand it, read it out loud. Your ear catches things your eye will happily forgive. If you stumble over a sentence, your reader is stumbling too … they just do it silently, and then they leave.
4. Get an outside read.
At this point, you’ve done everything you can to trick your own brain into seeing the page differently. Now it’s time to bring in a set of eyes that has absolutely none of the context you do.
Hand the page to someone who doesn’t know your business and give them zero explanation. Ask them: based only on what’s here, what does this business do, who does it seem to be for, what problem does it solve, and what would you assume this person is especially good at?
AI is genuinely useful for this, and it’s one of the ways I caught some of the biggest gaps on my own site. Copy the text from a page, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, and let it react to what’s actually there before you tell it anything about what you meant to say.
The lack of context is the entire point, so resist the urge to explain yourself first.
Then go back to the document you created in Step 2 and compare the two. Where does AI’s interpretation line up with the way you describe your business? Where does it miss something important? What did you think was obvious that apparently wasn’t obvious at all?
That difference is your gap.
And the best part is that you found it without having to magically become objective about your own writing.
💡 Bonus Tip: There are a couple ways AI can help you with this step. And the best part is that you don’t need any complicated prompts — you just have to ask it to review your pages from a couple different angles.
So copy the text from a page (or share the URL) in Claude or ChatGPT with no explanation at all. (Trust me, the lack of context is the whole point, so resist the urge to overexplain). Then, try one of these prompts:
The cold read. “Based only on the text below, what does this business do, who is it for, and what are they selling? Be specific.”
The stranger test. “You’re a small business owner who’s never heard of this person. After reading this page, would you know whether they can help you? What questions would you still have?”
The generic check. “Which sentences on this page could appear on any other business’s website in this industry? Which ones could only belong to this specific business?”
The gap comparison. Paste the document you wrote in step two, then the page copy, and ask: “Here’s how I describe my work. Here’s what’s on my website. Where do these two things not match?”
5. Sort everything you found into three piles.
By now you’ll probably have a list, and it’s probably longer than you were hoping for. This is the exact moment most website audits quietly die, because once you see everything that could use attention, it’s really easy for the whole thing to suddenly feel like one giant project.
But everything on that list is not the same size.
A typo that takes five minutes to fix should not be sitting in your brain next to “rewrite the services page.” One is a task. The other has actual decisions buried inside it. When we treat them like they’re equivalent, the list gets overwhelming fast … and then we end up doing neither.
So before you start fixing things, sort everything you found into three piles:
- Ten-minute fixes. Typos, broken links, outdated photos, incorrect pricing, a bio that needs two sentences updated. Knock these out in one sitting and get them off your list. You’ll be surprised how much better your site feels just from cleaning up the easy stuff.
- Real projects. Rewriting your services page, reorganizing your offers, or rethinking the messaging on your homepage isn’t a quick task. Those things require decisions, which means they deserve their own block of time and a clear first step. Instead of adding “rewrite services page” to your to-do list, figure out the first decision you actually need to make to move it forward.
- Not yours to do. Formatting fixes, image swaps, uploading new files, resizing graphics, or other mechanical updates don’t necessarily need your time or strategic brain. Identify what can be delegated and get it into someone else’s hands.
The point isn’t to finish everything you uncovered before you close your laptop. It’s to leave the process knowing what you can fix quickly, what deserves more focused attention, and what you can get off your plate entirely.
Because once you’ve done that, you no longer have a giant, overwhelming “fix my website” project. You have a plan.
What I Really Want You To Take From This
I promise I’m not telling you to redesign your website. I’m not telling you to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, and I am definitely not telling you to add another enormous project to a list that’s almost certainly too long already.
What I am saying is that it’s worth taking a fresh look every once in a while.
Because when you do, you’ll probably find a mix of things. Some will be quick fixes. Some will need a little more thought. And a few may turn into real projects that deserve their own time and attention. But the point isn’t to make your website perfect. It’s to make sure it still reflects the business you’re actually running today.
That means looking beyond what’s broken and asking a better question: Does this still sound like me?
Because most of the time, the gap isn’t between your website and some magical list of best practices. It’s between your website and what you already know about your own business.
You’ve refined how you talk about your work. You know which clients are the best fit. You’ve learned what people value most about working with you. You’ve simplified, adjusted, and sharpened your thinking along the way.
Your business has kept evolving. Every once in a while, your website just needs a chance to catch up.
The Brand Gut Check is a quick, honest look at whether what you’re saying is connecting the way you think it is. It’s free, it won’t take you all day, and it’ll show you pretty quickly where the gaps are.