Does Your Website Actually Work?

Most business owners look at their own website once a year. Their customers look at it every day.

This month we developed and ran the new M37 Web Assessment Tool across four real WordPress websites. Three of them were our own. The fourth belonged to an organisation we were reviewing. What we found surprised us.

What the tool checks

The tool reads a website the way a very patient visitor would. It looks at six areas.

1 Security. Are the basics locked down, or is the door open?

2 Broken things. Links, images and email addresses that lead nowhere.

3 Content. Out of date events, pages that contradict each other, demo content left behind.

4 Compliance. A privacy policy, a PAIA manual, and consent wording on forms that collect personal information.

5 Performance. How quickly pages load.

6 Journey. Can a visitor find what they came for and get in touch?

Then an AI review reads the site in context and flags what simple rules miss. The result is a scored PDF report.

What we found

Our own site, m37.co.za, scored 87. Not bad. But the tool found nine demo school courses still live from our website theme, complete with fictional tutors. It also found shopping cart pages on a site that sells nothing. Embarrassing, and very useful. We are cleaning them up.

Another scored 76. It had 84 broken links, most of them pointing to a partner website that closed years ago.

An older one of ours scored 84. Its home page was still promoting the previous year’s summit as if it were coming up.

The fourth site scored 40. A hacker had injected hundreds of spam pages. The booking email address on the home page had a one letter typo, so enquiries went nowhere. And a file on the server was growing so fast it would eventually fill the disk. The owners had no idea.

Three of the four sites had no privacy policy, even though their forms collect names and email addresses. In South Africa that is a POPIA problem waiting to happen.

The lesson we did not expect

Our first run also produced seven false alarms. One flagged a speaker’s CV as spam because it mentioned a casino where he had once spoken. Another flagged a book blurb because a princess was being escorted home.

So we changed the rules. Every serious finding is now checked a second way before it reaches a report. One suspicious word is never enough. It goes to the AI review, which reads it in context. And a person signs off the report.

That is what we mean by Agent Quotient. The machine does the heavy lifting. A second check, and a person, keep it honest.

Five things to check on your own site this week

1. Click every link on your home page, including the email address.
2. Look for events, prices or people that are out of date.
3. Make sure you have a privacy policy and consent wording on every form.
4. Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.za and look for pages you do not recognise.
5. Open your site on your phone and try to contact yourself.

Want us to check it for you?

For the rest of this campaign we are offering a free Quick Website Check to the first 20 businesses and non profits who ask. You get a scored PDF report showing what is broken, what is risky and what to fix first.

Email bruce@em-solutions.co.za with your website address, or book a call at bit.ly/BruceWade.