The good, the bad and the ugly of your website
Every website is one of three things. Good: you find what you need and leave happy. Bad: you find it eventually, a bit annoyed. Ugly: you leave before the page has finished loading and never come back.
The difference is rarely the budget. It is whether anyone looks at the site again after launch.
A website is never done
Most businesses launch a site and leave it alone for years. Plugins age, content goes stale, pages slow down, and nobody notices until sales do. An audit once or twice a year is cheaper than a relaunch every three years.
The five pillars
I audit along five lines. Performance: test with PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Security: check your headers on securityheaders.com and Mozilla Observatory. Accessibility: alt text, contrast, keyboard use. SEO: Search Console and a crawler like Screaming Frog. And UX, which matters most and which no tool can fully measure.
Make users happy, not Lighthouse happy
A perfect 100 is lovely. But lab scores are single numbers on a single machine. Real users are on old phones and bad train Wi-Fi. Watch how they actually use your site, and fix what slows them down.
In Porto we laughed at some truly ugly examples. The point wasn’t to mock anyone. It was to show that every one of those problems is fixable, usually without a redesign.
