Most Thunder Bay business owners built their website once, checked it looked fine, and never looked at it again. That's normal — you're running a business, not a web agency. But a website is the one piece of marketing that works around the clock, and if it's quietly broken, slow, or invisible to Google, it's costing you customers you'll never know you lost.
10 Signs It's Time for a Website Audit
It's been more than a year since anything changed
Search engines and visitors both read an unchanged website as inactive. If your hours, services, or team photo are out of date, it also tells real customers the business itself might not be either.
It's slow to load, especially on a phone
Over half of local searches happen on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. If your homepage takes more than 3 seconds to load on a phone, a meaningful share of visitors leave before they ever see what you offer.
It doesn't resize properly on a phone or tablet
Pinch-to-zoom, overlapping text, or buttons too small to tap aren't just annoying — Google actively ranks mobile-unfriendly sites lower in local search results.
You can't find your own business when you search for it
Search your main service plus "Thunder Bay" from a phone in an incognito window. If you're not on the first page, most people looking for exactly what you offer aren't finding you either.
There's no obvious way to contact you
If a visitor has to scroll or hunt to find your phone number, email, or a contact form, most won't bother. Your contact information should be visible within the first few seconds on every page.
Your browser shows "Not Secure" next to your web address
A missing SSL certificate triggers a security warning in every major browser before a visitor even sees your homepage. It also actively hurts your Google ranking.
Links or buttons lead nowhere
Broken links and "404 Page Not Found" errors are one of the fastest ways to lose a visitor's trust — and they quietly accumulate over time as pages get renamed or removed.
Your website and your Google Business Profile don't match
If your address, hours, or phone number are listed differently on your site than on Google, it confuses both customers and Google's ranking algorithm.
"Thunder Bay" doesn't appear anywhere in your content
If your site never mentions your service area by name, Google has no strong signal to show you for local searches — even if you're the closest and best option in town.
You have no idea how many people visit your site
If Google Analytics isn't installed — or you've never looked at it — you're making every marketing decision blind. You can't fix what you can't measure.
What a Professional Website Audit Actually Checks
A proper audit goes beyond a visual glance and looks at the parts of your site visitors and Google can't see at a glance:
- Page speed on both desktop and mobile connections
- Mobile responsiveness across common screen sizes
- SEO fundamentals — title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, image alt text
- Technical health — SSL certificate, broken links, duplicate or missing content
- Local SEO signals — Google Business Profile consistency, local keyword coverage
- Analytics and tracking — whether you're actually collecting the data to make decisions
Get Your Free Website Audit
Aurix Technologies offers a free website audit for Thunder Bay businesses — speed, mobile-friendliness, SEO fundamentals, and security, with a plain-English summary of what to fix first.
Get Your Free AuditFrequently Asked Questions About Website Audits
Conclusion
None of these ten signs mean you need to rebuild your website from scratch. Most are small, specific fixes — a missing SSL certificate, a slow-loading image, a contact button that's too easy to miss. The hard part isn't fixing them, it's knowing they're there.
That's what an audit is for. Get your free website audit and find out exactly what's working, what isn't, and what to fix first — or reach out to Aurix Technologies directly.