Small Business Website Audit: What We Found on a Taekwondo School's Old WordPress Site

Run Google Lighthouse for performance, accessibility, and SEO, then send a real enquiry through your own contact form and see where it lands. We did both in a client meeting this week. The scores were low, but the bigger problem turned out to be that the school's enquiry emails were going to spam.

The client runs a taekwondo school in Calgary. Their website was built on WordPress by another developer years ago, and since then the owner has only uploaded photos and edited text. Nobody had looked at it as a whole since launch. They've since asked us to rebuild it, and we'll publish the before-and-after once it's live. This post is the "before".

The scores, and what they mean

We ran Lighthouse (version 13.4, desktop) on the homepage. Mobile was low too.

The owner had never seen these numbers and didn't know what they affected. That's normal. Here is what was behind each one.

Performance: 53

Two measurements dragged it down:

• Largest Contentful Paint: 5.1 seconds. That's how long the biggest thing on the screen, usually the hero photo, takes to appear. Google's target is 2.5 seconds or less. For five seconds a parent who just searched "taekwondo near me" is looking at a half-loaded page.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.211. The page jumps around while it loads, because images have no set size and push content down when they arrive. Google's target is 0.1 or less. It's the reason people tap the wrong button.

Underneath both: the homepage weighed 7.5 MB. Lighthouse estimated about 3.5 MB of that could be saved just by serving images at the right size and format. Another 1 MB was CSS and JavaScript loaded but never used, the usual leftovers from themes and plugins. On a phone over cellular, every one of those megabytes is a wait.

Accessibility: 77

This sounds like a niche concern until you list what it caught:

• Zooming was disabled. The page told phones not to let people pinch to zoom. For a parent who left their reading glasses in the car, small text simply can't be read.
• Form fields had no labels. Screen readers can't tell a visitor which box is for the name and which is for the phone number.
• Low contrast text in places, hard to read in daylight on a phone.
• Links with no readable name, and headings out of order.

None of these are exotic. They're the default results of a theme that was never checked.

SEO: 85

85 sounds fine. The two things it flagged weren't:

• No meta description on the homepage. Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds, which is rarely the sentence you'd choose.
• Links search engines can't follow. Some navigation links weren't real links, so crawlers couldn't reach the pages behind them.

The finding that mattered more than any score

When we asked how website enquiries arrived, the answer was "by email." When we looked at how, it turned out the contact form sent mail through the previous developer's own email account over SMTP, which then delivered it to the school. And those emails were landing in the school's spam folder.

So for some unknown stretch of time, parents who filled in the trial-class form may have heard nothing back. Not because the owner ignored them, but because the messages were sitting where nobody looks.

The usual cause is simple. When mail claims to come from one place but is sent through an account that isn't authorized for it, the receiving inbox can't verify it and treats it as suspicious. Google's own sender guidelines spell out the records (SPF and DKIM) that let a domain prove its mail is genuine.

When we build a site, the form always sends through the client's own domain, authenticated, and delivers to the client's own inbox. The business should never depend on a developer's personal account to receive its own customers.

If you only do one thing after reading this: submit your own contact form from someone else's phone, then check your inbox and your spam folder.

A website is a storefront sign

The owner's question was a fair one: does any of this really matter, if the site works?

What we told them is that a website works the way a sign out front does. When you walk down a street looking for somewhere to eat, you lean toward the place with a clean sign and a tidy front, even before you know anything about the food. Nobody decides that consciously. It just feels more trustworthy.

A website is the sign people see before they ever visit. If it's slow, cluttered, and visibly from another era, a parent comparing three schools will hesitate, even if your classes are the best in the city. That hesitation never shows up in a report. It's just a phone call that doesn't happen.

The owner agreed immediately. They'd felt it, they just hadn't had the words or the numbers.

Check your own site in fifteen minutes

1. Go to PageSpeed Insights, enter your homepage, and look at both the mobile and desktop tabs.
2. Note Largest Contentful Paint (aim for 2.5 seconds or less) and Cumulative Layout Shift (0.1 or less).
3. Scroll to the Accessibility section and look specifically for zoom being disabled and form fields without labels.
4. In the SEO section, check for a missing meta description.
5. From a phone that isn't yours, submit your contact form. Check the inbox and the spam folder.
6. Find out whose email account your form sends through. If it isn't yours, fix that first.

The scores are useful, but step 5 is the one that tells you whether you're losing customers today.

Further reading

• What to keep checking every month after a fix: website maintenance cost per month.
• If the form works but people still don't fill it in: 4 contact form fixes for more qualified leads.
• Before handing a rebuild to anyone: evaluating web development partners.
• How we build local business sites: local business websites.