Try your website the way a customer would

You may review your website at a desk, with time to read every section. A customer could be opening it between appointments, trying to find one answer on their phone.

Give yourself a task for your next review. Find out whether the business serves your area or try making an enquiry.

Follow the route a visitor might take

Start on a service or product page as well as the homepage. Can you tell where you are and find the information needed to continue?

Try the contact step. Can you tap the controls comfortably? Are required fields clear? If you make a mistake, does the page explain what to fix and keep your message?

Notice useful details buried beneath long introductions and buttons whose labels give little indication of what happens next.

Include different ways of using the site

Try a keyboard and check whether you can see which control has focus. Review labels, error messages, and text contrast. This is a starting point, not a complete accessibility review.

The W3C accessibility guidelines cover these needs in more detail.

Record where completing your task becomes difficult. Fix one issue, then try again.

Ask someone else to try the task

Once you know a website well, it is easy to move past a confusing label because you remember where the link goes. Ask someone less familiar with it to complete a task while you watch.

Avoid pointing out the button or explaining the wording before they try. Notice where they look first, what they expect to happen, and where they stop to ask a question.

You do not need to act on every preference about colours or layout. Pay particular attention to anything that prevents them from finding an answer or finishing the task. Write down what happened so the next change has a specific problem to address.