Sample Website Review: What You Get and What It Typically Finds

Last updated: February 22, 2026

You’ve been staring at your website for months. You tweak the headline. You change the button color. You rewrite the tagline for the 11th time. And yet, your inbox stays quiet.

Something is wrong. You just can’t figure out what.

You’ve heard about professional website reviews. But what do you actually get?

A checklist of generic best practices that could apply to anyone’s website? A lecture about font sizes? A politely worded PDF that tells you your website “could be improved”?

Here’s what a real website review looks like, what issues it typically uncovers, and a sample website review report that shows you what you get at the end.

Is a website review what will help you right now?

Before you read any further, let’s make sure this is actually what you need.

A website review will be useful to you if:

You’ve figured out your positioning and target audience (i.e., what you sell, to whom, and how it helps)
Your website is live and getting traffic, but not nearly enough inquiries, or
You’re about to launch a new website or landing page and want to catch problems before they cost you clients
You’ve been making random changes and can’t tell what’s helping or hurting
You suspect your website has issues but can’t put your finger on exactly what they are

What a website review is (and what it isn’t)

A website review is not a technical SEO audit. I’m not going to hand you a spreadsheet of missing meta tags or a keyword density report. That’s a different job entirely.

It’s also not a redesign or a copywriting project. You won’t get a finished page mockup or ready-to-use copy at the end. Sometimes I’ll rewrite a headline or a paragraph, or mock up part of a page to show you exactly what I mean, but that’s to make a recommendation concrete, not to hand you finished work.

Here’s what a website review is: a detailed analysis of why your website isn’t converting your prospects—covering copy, design, and UX together—with specific, actionable recommendations for fixing each issue.

I look at your website the way your prospects do: as someone who landed on it, knows nothing about you yet, and needs to be convinced to reach out.

Before the review: the discovery questionnaire

Generic feedback is useless. To tell you why your website isn’t converting your prospects, I need to understand your specific situation first—what you sell, who you’re selling it to, what makes them tick, and what makes them hesitate.

The same message can work great for one audience and fall completely flat for another. A homepage that converts perfectly for a B2B SaaS company would be all wrong for a solo business consultant. And vice versa.

That’s why before reviewing your website, I send you an in-depth questionnaire about your business, your offers, and your target audience. The more specific your answers, the more specific my improvement recommendations will be.

The review framework: what gets evaluated

Every website review is based on answering four fundamental questions your prospects are asking themselves (whether they know it or not) as they read through your website.

Criterion

The question behind it

Common issues

1. Clarity

“Do I understand what this is?”

Does your homepage immediately tell visitors what you do, who it’s for, and what they should do next? Or does it take three paragraphs and a lot of goodwill to figure out you’re a lawyer and not a life coach?

Vague taglines, jargon-heavy copy, and buried calls to action all fail this test.

2. Relevance

“Is this for someone like me?”

Your prospects need to recognize themselves in your copy: their problem, their situation, their hesitations.

If your website talks about what you do instead of what they’re going through, you’re losing most of them.

3. Value

“Can this actually help me?”

Not in a vague, “we offer comprehensive solutions” kind of way, but as in “here’s specifically what I do and here’s specifically what changes for you.”

Your prospects aren’t buying your service. They’re buying the outcome. If that outcome isn’t clear, they’ll find someone whose website makes it explicit.

4. Trustworthiness

“Can I trust these people?”

Specificity. Social proof. Real people. Evidence that you’ve done this before and it worked.

Your website visitors have just met you, a random person on the internet. They aren’t going to take your word for it. Testimonials, case studies, and concrete results are what will make them trust you (and nothing else).

On top of that: design-specific criteria

Your copy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your web design either supports your message or gets in a way. So every website review also covers:

Navigation and usability: can prospects find what they need without getting lost or frustrated?

Readability: can your prospects read everything with ease? Or do they have to take out a magnifying glass to decipher the small print or guess the ending of your tagline because of the low contrast with the background image?

Visual hierarchy and distractions: does your web design make your pages easy to skim, guiding your prospects toward the action you want them to take? Or is everything competing for attention at once? Every element is either helping them move toward reaching out or getting in the way of your message. There’s nothing in between.

CTA effectiveness: are your calls to action clearly visible, specific, and compelling? Or do they look like plain text, blend into the background, or say something as thrilling as “More info”?

What the website review report contains

Along with a video walk-through that summarizes the main problems and improvement recommendations, you’ll get a detailed written report that covers every page in scope.

Want to see what a sample website review looks like?

Download a sample website review below. It’s a real review of a real website (with the company name and screenshots removed for confidentiality). You’ll see:

insights from the competitor analysis
detailed homepage and About page findings
improved outlines for both pages
reasoning behind every recommendation

Here’s what’s inside every written website review report:

Competitor analysis

Before I look at your website, I look at the websites of your competitors. What are they getting right (and where you’ll have to match up)? What are they all saying that makes them sound identical? Where’s the gap you could step into?

Main strategic angle

One clear idea for how you should frame your value proposition to better match what your prospects are actually looking for when they’re deciding who to hire.

Repeating issues

Patterns that show up across multiple pages—the same reoccurring design problem and copy mistake. These are the low-hanging fruit that you should fix first.

Page-by-page analysis

For each page in scope, I list all the copy, design, and UX issues, with specific examples from your actual pages and specific suggestions for fixing each one.

It’s not “your headline could be stronger.” It’s “your headline says X, which doesn’t work because Y, and here’s a direction that would work better because of Z.”

Improved page outline

That’s optional, but for each page reviewed, you can get an improved page outline that shows you the order of sections and their messaging in a nutshell based on how your prospects actually make decisions.

The reasoning

This is the part most reviews skip. I explain why I’m recommending what I’m recommending, so you can make informed decisions about what to implement and in what order. You’re not just following instructions but learning to understand the principles of effective copy and design that persuade your prospects.

Q&A

Once you’ve gone through the report, you get a follow-up Q&A session to work through anything that isn’t clear or that you want to examine into further.

Typical issues I uncover during a website review

Every website is different. But after reviewing hundreds of them, some issues show up again and again.

1) Visual clutter that buries the message

In one recent review, the main call to action was competing with an awards carousel, three large team headshots, and a row of client logos — all above the fold. The CTA was technically there, but nobody was clicking it because of the visual clutter that was causing cognitive overwhelm.

2) Copy that talks about the company instead of the prospect

Count the “we” and “our” on your homepage. Now count the “you” and “your.” If the first number is higher, you have a problem. Your prospects don’t care about you as much as they care about themselves. Your copy should reflect that.

3) Above-the-fold messaging that doesn’t hook anyone

“We provide exceptional service tailored to your every need.”

Spoiler alert: “I need to hire someone who provides exceptional service tailored to my every need,” said no prospect ever. Your copy needs to use words and phrases your prospects use when talking about their problems and desired results. Jargon and vague claims, especially in your website tagline, will lose you clients faster than you can blink.

4) CTAs that look like text

If your call to action doesn’t look clickable, people won’t click it. Sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed how often it’s an issue.

5) Sections that add length without adding value

Too much whitespace between sections, decorative images that say nothing, repeated information in slightly different words. All of this makes your page longer without making it more persuasive, which leads to fewer prospects reading till the end.

6) Design inconsistencies that create an unpolished impression

Three different base font sizes on the same page. Centered text that goes on for five lines. All-caps paragraphs that are genuinely painful to read. These aren’t just aesthetic issues. They add cognitive load, make your pages hard to read, and quietly make your visitors trust you less and give up.