The 90-Minute Website Audit to Run Before Your Busy Season

02 September 2026·4 min read

Quick answer: Block out 90 minutes before your busy period starts and work through six 15-minute checks: speed and mobile, your actual booking or enquiry flow, CTA placement, content freshness, your Google Business Profile, and broken links or forms. Go through it as a customer would, not as the person who built the site. 🌴

If your busy season is a few weeks out, your website is about to do more work than it's done all year — and most businesses have never actually tested it as a customer would. Not because they're careless, but because a “proper” website audit sounds like a multi-day project, so it never happens and small, fixable problems sit there quietly costing enquiries right as traffic picks up 💖. It doesn't need to take days. Ninety focused minutes, run like a mystery shopper on your own site, catches almost everything that matters.

What most businesses get wrong

The first mistake is testing on your own wifi, on your own desktop, logged into your own admin — which is the least realistic way a real visitor will ever experience your site. The second is fixing what's visible (old photos, outdated team bios) while ignoring what's invisible but far more costly, like a broken enquiry form or a page that takes eight seconds to load on mobile data. The third is doing the audit and never actually working through the list of fixes — a document of problems nobody actions isn't an audit, it's a guilt trip.

The 90-Minute Pre-Busy-Season Audit

0–15 min — Speed & mobile: run your homepage and one deep page through a free page-speed test, then load the site on your own phone over mobile data, not wifi.
15–30 min — Booking/enquiry flow: submit a real test enquiry or booking yourself, start to finish, and confirm the confirmation email or SMS actually arrives.
30–45 min — CTA placement: check your main call-to-action appears in the nav, the hero, and on mobile as a sticky element — not just once in the footer.
45–60 min — Content freshness: hunt for stale opening hours, last season's promo banner, old team members, or “closed for holidays” messages still live.
60–75 min — Google Business Profile match: confirm your hours, categories and photos on Google actually match what's true right now, not six months ago.
75–90 min — Broken links & forms: click every nav link and submit every form on the site once, end to end.

Keep a simple two-column list as you go — Issue and Fix — and sort it into “fix today” and “fix after the rush” once you're done.

A booking-based business with lots of no-shows: running a real test booking through the audit revealed the automated reminder email had silently stopped sending three months earlier — an easy fix, but invisible until someone actually walked through the flow.

A local service business with a seasonal dip: a leftover “closed over the holidays” banner from the previous quiet period was still sitting at the top of the homepage, quietly discouraging bookings right as the busy season was starting.

An e-commerce store: the mobile “add to cart” button was overlapping another element on one specific phone screen size — invisible on desktop, and caught only because the audit specifically included a real mobile test, days before a seasonal traffic spike.

How to actually run it

Pick a genuinely quiet 90-minute block — not squeezed between calls — and treat it like you're a stranger visiting the site for the first time, not the person who built it. Go through on your phone for at least half the audit; more of your traffic than you'd guess arrives on mobile. Write issues down as you find them rather than trying to fix them mid-audit — fixing derails the flow and you'll miss things further down the list.

💡 Put it on the calendar every year. Set a recurring reminder a few weeks before your known busy season starts, not just this once — the same stale-banner and broken-form issues have a habit of creeping back in during the quiet months.

Mistakes to avoid

Only testing on your own wifi and desktop, never on mobile data.
Skipping the actual test booking or enquiry — reading the form isn't the same as submitting it.
Not checking your Google Business Profile hours before a public holiday or seasonal change.
Fixing cosmetic issues (typos, old photos) while ignoring page speed and broken forms.
Building the issues list and then never actually working through it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I really do this in 90 minutes?

The audit itself, yes, for most small business sites — this is spotting-time, not fixing-time. A bigger, older or more complex site might take longer to work through, and some of the fixes you find (page speed issues especially) can take a developer more than an afternoon to resolve.

Do I need a developer to run this?

No — most of the checklist is things any business owner can do themselves with a phone and a free speed-test tool. A few fixes you uncover (genuine speed or hosting issues) may need technical help, but the audit itself doesn't.

How often should I run this?

At minimum, before each busy season. If your business has more than one seasonal peak a year, it's worth doing before each one rather than just annually.

What if I find a big problem I can't fix before the rush starts?

Note it, triage it, and don't panic-launch a rebuild days before your busy period — a rushed fix under pressure often creates new problems. Patch what you can quickly and safely, and schedule the bigger fix for the quieter period after.