Four things you do not know about your own website, and should

If you run a shop, you know what is on the shelves. If you run a garage, you know which cars are in. If you run a property, you know which rooms are booked for Friday.

About your website, which is often the most expensive thing you have bought in the last five years, many people cannot answer four basic questions.

That is not negligence. It is that nobody ever told you what the questions are. Let us go through them, and above all how to answer them without knowing anything technical.

Who else is running code inside your pages?

This is the first one, and it is the one that surprises people most often.

A typical small-business site does not load only its own things. It loads a font from a server somewhere else. A «share» button from a social network. A map. A measurement tool. A tool somebody added three years ago for one campaign and left there. A pixel (hidden tracking code) from an advertising platform you no longer use.

How do you see it? The developer tools built into every browser show the list of everything your page downloads, and anything that is not your own address is somebody else.

Why it matters, in the order that will sting:

First, speed. Every one of those files adds time to the load, and time lost on a phone costs visitors.

Second, obligations. Many of them place cookies or send a visitor’s details somewhere else. That puts you inside a set of duties described in our article on cookies and consent, and not knowing is not a defence.

Third, and many people skip this one: it is code executing inside your page that you did not write. If it changes, it changes on your page, without anyone asking you.

What do you do with the list? For each line, one question: am I still using this? Whatever you are not, goes. If you would rather have the list ready, with what each item does written beside it, without opening any browser tools, that is exactly the job MS-Consent does: it scans the page and shows you what it found.

Do the numbers you look at measure what you think?

Most people have some measurement tool on their site. Fewer open it. Very few have ever checked whether it tells the truth.

And I do not mean accuracy to the second decimal. I mean this: you press «Send» on your form, the message arrives, and then you open your tool. Was it recorded? On plenty of sites, it is not. Or it is recorded even when the submission failed.

Now try it in reverse, which is more painful. Measurement tools call a «conversion» any action you have told them to treat as a success: a form that was submitted, a tap on your phone number, an order that went through. So take ten of those from last month, one by one, and find out how many ended up as a person you actually spoke to or who actually paid you. If the number surprises you, the market is not at fault. What has been defined as success is.

And if at this point you thought «fine, but I would not even know where to look for that», you are not the exception, you are the rule. We have written separately about how to read the reports as a non-technical person. It is one of those things that can often be answered quickly when somebody knows where to look.

The basic question remains, though: are we measuring the right thing at all?

And there is a newer wrinkle. More and more people get their answer from an assistant without ever landing on your site. That influence shows up in no measurement tool, ours included, because no visit took place. What can be measured is the visits that do end up reaching your site from answer engines (AI). That is why we built MS-Analytics, which measures without cookies and picks out those visits. It counts only the ones that arrive, not the answer given without a click. It does not have to be our tool. It does have to be something you open and understand.

When was it last checked, and what does «checked» mean?

The third question is the easiest of all to answer. It is also the one that most often gets «I don’t remember».

A site does not break suddenly. It frays. A link breaks because a page moved. An image is uploaded at full size, and from that day every visitor downloads 4 MB just to see it, something we have looked at in detail. A page stops appearing in search because somebody ticked a box. A certificate approaches its expiry.

None of these screams. Together, though, over eighteen months, they turn into a site about which you say «something is off and I don’t know what».

One caution: a check is not a score. I have watched business owners chase a number in a speed tool as though it were the point. It is not. What you want is a list of specific findings, and beside each one, what it means for you.

Twice a year is enough for a quiet site, and certainly after every significant change. If you would rather the check ran by itself and the list arrived ready, that is exactly what MS-Tools was built for, and we are its first users on our own websites. If you prefer to run it by hand, that is fine too. As long as it gets done.

Who takes it on when it breaks?

I left the fourth for last because it is the only one no tool solves.

Run a thought experiment. It is Saturday night. Your site will not open. Who do you call, and what are they obliged to do?

If the answer is «the person who built it, if they pick up», you do not have support. You have an acquaintance. And an acquaintance works right up until the day they are at a christening.

The difference between «I’ll take a look» and «I’ve got it» is contractual, not emotional. It means somebody is obliged to act, that backups exist and get tested, that somebody is alerted before you notice. I have paid for this on my own site, as I described the other day, and I was the builder, the client and the responsible party all at once.

That is precisely what maintenance and support as a service is. It does not have to be ours. It does have to have a name, a price and an obligation. If whoever builds your site tells you «don’t worry, anything you need», ask for it in writing. You will know immediately what you have.

And if you have no time for any of it

It would be dishonest to tell you that you will sit down and do all four this week. You will not, and we both know it.

So if you keep two, keep the first and the fourth.

The first, because it often takes a few minutes and you will probably find things that have been loading for years for no reason. The fourth, because it takes one phone call and answers the only question that will genuinely matter to you at some point.

The other two can wait. But do not forget them, because the order in which people discover all this is very often the same: first something breaks, then they go looking for who takes it on, and only then do they realise that the numbers they had been watching for a year were not saying what they thought.

If you do not know what loads on your site, what your numbers really measure and who steps in when it breaks, we will go through all four for your own case. You get a list of what we found and what we suggest, in order of priority, with a clear line between what is only measurement, what is monitoring and what is intervention. Send us your website address through the contact form. If you then want us to take the site on, with a contractual obligation to step in, that is our maintenance and support.

The whole picture: this article covers one part of a larger subject. If you are after the whole of it, from commissioning to replacement, it is in the guide to your website.