Most people assume that once a website is built and handed over, it's been checked. That buttons go somewhere. That the links work. That there aren't any leftover placeholder pages sitting quietly in the background, completely live, completely visible to Google, saying absolutely nothing useful about your business.
Most people are wrong.
I've taken over a lot of websites from other developers over the years. And what I find, more often than I'd like to admit is normal, is a site that looks fine on the surface but is quietly riddled with problems the original developer either didn't notice, didn't fix, or didn't think mattered.
It matters. It matters for your customers, who click a button and end up nowhere. It matters for Google, which is crawling all of those broken pages and drawing conclusions about your site. And it matters for you, because you paid for a website that actually works.
Here's what I find most often — and how to spot it on your own site, without going anywhere near the back end.
The most common mistakes lurking inside badly built websites
Buttons and links that go nowhere
Click the main call-to-action button on your homepage. Does it go somewhere useful? Now click the one in your footer. And the one on your about page. A surprising number of websites have buttons that either link to a page that doesn't exist, go to the wrong page entirely, or simply do nothing at all. This happens when a developer uses a template — copying the same layout across every client's site — and doesn't bother to update the links for the actual client.
Mega menus full of broken or irrelevant links
If your website has a large dropdown navigation menu, click every single link in it. Do they all go somewhere that makes sense? I've inherited sites where the mega menu was linking to pages on the demo website the template came from — completely different businesses, completely different content. Your visitors are clicking those links. Your potential customers are ending up somewhere that has nothing to do with you.
Pages that were never meant to go live — but did
This is the one that surprises people most. WordPress and page builder themes like Divi come with sample pages, test pages, and template pages built in. A good developer removes or redirects these before launch. A lazy one doesn't.
That means your site might have live, publicly accessible pages with URLs like /sample-page/, /home-2/, /test/, or /page-2/ — pages with no real content, or worse, dummy content from the original theme that has nothing to do with your business. Google has probably already found them. They're not helping you.
Weird, meaningless URLs
Your page URLs (the bit after your domain name) should describe what the page is about. /web-design-services/ is good. /7hgf93k/ or /page-id-204/ or /untitled-1/ is not. Bad URLs are an SEO problem, but they also make your site look unfinished and untrustworthy to anyone who notices.
Images straight from a camera or phone, never optimised
A photograph taken on a modern smartphone can easily be 5 or 6 megabytes. Uploaded directly onto a website without any resizing or compression, that image is making your pages slow to load — and slow pages lose visitors and rank lower on Google. Image optimisation takes about thirty seconds with the right tools. A lot of developers skip it entirely.
No page titles, missing meta descriptions, or placeholder SEO content
Every page on your website should have a title tag and a meta description — the text that appears in Google search results. If your developer didn't set these up, Google will make something up, and it usually doesn't reflect well on you. Even worse: some sites go live with the dummy SEO content that comes with the plugin — things like "Enter your meta description here" sitting live in Google's index.
The quick front-end checklist
You don't need to log into anything. Just open your website in a browser and spend ten minutes doing this:
- Click every button on your homepage — do they all go somewhere useful?
- Open your navigation menu and click every single link — do they all work and make sense?
- Look at the URL bar as you click around — do the URLs look descriptive and logical, or odd and random?
- Google your business name — does your website appear? Does the text under the link in Google's results actually describe what you do, or does it look auto-generated?
- Search
site:yourwebsite.co.ukin Google (replace with your actual domain) — scroll through every page that appears. Recognise all of them? Any that look like they shouldn't be there? - Load your homepage on your phone — does it look right? Is it slow?
- Click the footer links — do they all work?
If you've ticked everything and it all looks fine, great. If you've found things that don't seem right — or if that Google search turned up pages you've never seen before — it's worth getting someone to take a proper look.
What can be done about it?
It depends on how deep the problems go.
Some of this is fixable without rebuilding the whole site. Broken links can be corrected. Rogue pages can be removed or redirected. Images can be replaced with optimised versions. Meta descriptions can be written and added. If the bones of the site are solid, a proper tidy-up might be all you need — and that's exactly what my Pay As You Go web support hours are designed for. No big contracts, no retainers, just someone who knows what they're doing going in and fixing what's wrong.
Sometimes, though, the problems run deeper. If the site was built on a hard-coded template that was never properly set up for your business, if the URLs are a mess and can't be changed without breaking everything, if the whole thing is slow and difficult to update — a fresh start on a properly built foundation is genuinely the better investment.
Either way, you deserve to know what you've actually got.
Want someone else to do the checking for you?
If going through that checklist has made you a bit nervous — or if you'd rather have someone who knows what they're looking for cast an eye over the whole thing — I offer a free SEO and website health check.
I'll run your homepage through the tools, take a proper manual look at what's going on under the surface, and then have a 30-minute call with you to walk through what I find. That includes the kind of technical issues covered in this post — broken links, rogue pages, image problems, missing or placeholder SEO content — as well as how your site is performing on Google more broadly.
No cost. No obligation. No list of terrifying problems followed by a £5,000 quote.
Get a free website health check →
Not sure which camp you're in?
Book a free 30-minute chat and I'll take a look at your site with you. No jargon, no pressure, no making you feel like you should have known any of this already.
We'll talk through what's there, what matters, and what — if anything — needs to happen next. Honest advice, nothing more.
