Teardown 01 · 2026-09-18
We put a real website under the lamp, and write down everything we find.
A family-run landscaping company in Oakville and Burlington. Trading 24 years. Not a client, not a competitor, and not named — the findings are the point, and they do not need a name to be useful. Every number below was measured on a phone, once, on 2026-09-18.
The score, out of nine checks
- Passed
- 3
- Partly
- 3
- Failed
- 3
- Of
- 9
3,103 px tall on a phone
The findings
What did the nine checks find, and where on the page does each one live?
-
1
Speed on a real phone
LCP 4,444 ms
The main picture finishes arriving four and a half seconds after the tap. On a phone, on a driveway, that is a person deciding you are closed.
Three megabytes across sixty-three requests, most of it thirty-five photographs served at full size to a 390-pixel-wide screen.
The fix Resize and re-encode the photographs, defer everything below the fold. No redesign required.
-
2
Mobile experience
12 tap targets under 44 px
It fits the screen and it does not scroll sideways, which is more than many do. But twelve of the things you are meant to tap are smaller than a fingertip.
A desktop layout narrowed rather than a phone layout designed. The menu and the footer links keep their mouse-sized hit areas.
The fix Padding, not markup. An afternoon.
-
3
The five-second clarity test
Clear in words, absent in structure
The first line a visitor reads does say who this is, where they work and for how long. That is the hard part and it is already done.
But there is no H1 on the page, so the one sentence that matters is, to a machine, the same weight as a caption under a photograph.
The fix Promote the sentence that is already there. One tag.
-
4
One clear primary action
0 phone links · 0 forms
This is the finding that costs the most money. There is no way to make contact on the home page at all — not a tappable number, not a form, nothing.
The number exists in the footer as plain text. On a phone, plain text is not a call; it is a thing you have to copy.
The fix A tel: link in the header and a three-field form at the foot of the page.
-
5
Technical SEO basics
Title 50 · description 111 · canonical set
The head is in better shape than the body. Title, description and canonical are all present and none of them is auto-generated slop.
The description is short enough that Google will likely write its own instead, and with no H1 there is no heading structure under it to quote from.
The fix Lengthen the description, add the H1, and the head and body finally agree.
-
6
Structured data
None
There is no LocalBusiness markup. No address, no hours, no service area, no telephone in a form a machine can read.
For a business whose customers search "landscaper near me", this is the single largest gap on the page. The map pack is assembled from exactly this.
The fix One JSON-LD block. It changes nothing a visitor sees and everything a crawler understands.
-
7
Trust signals
Named owners · insured · 24 years
A clear pass, and the best thing on the site. The owners are named. The business says it is family-run, fully insured, and how long it has been trading.
That is the kind of proof that is hard to fake and easy to check, which is why it works.
The fix Nothing. Move it further up the page.
-
8
Analytics and tracking
Installed and firing
Analytics is on the page and reporting.
Though with no form and no tappable number there is no conversion for it to record, so it is currently counting an audience rather than a business.
The fix Fix point 4 and this starts being worth reading.
-
9
Security and maintenance
HTTPS · 0 insecure subresources · 0 errors
Clean. Valid certificate, nothing loaded over plain HTTP, not one JavaScript error in the console.
Unglamorous and frequently not true elsewhere.
The fix Nothing.
The readings
What did the measurements say?
One page load, iPhone viewport, real mobile user agent. Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift read from the browser’s own performance timeline, bytes counted off the response headers.
| Reading | Result | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint | 4,444 ms | Google treats 2,500 ms as the edge of "good". |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 0.1844 | The threshold is 0.1. This is nearly double it. |
| Weight on the wire | 3,111 KB | Across 63 requests, on a phone. |
| Images | 35 | 34 of them declare no width or height. |
| Images with alt text | 1 of 35 | A screen reader is told nothing about the other 34. |
| H1 elements | 0 | Nothing on the page says, structurally, what it is. |
| Structured data | None | No LocalBusiness, no address, no hours, no service area. |
| Ways to make contact | 0 | No tel: link and no form anywhere on the home page. |
| HTTPS · console errors | Clean | Certificate valid, no insecure subresources, zero errors. |
The method
Which nine checks do we run, every time?
These are not chosen to suit the site. They are the nine we run before quoting any project, in this order, and they are written up in full in the nine-point audit. A teardown is that procedure, done in public, on somebody who did not ask us to be kind.
Your site
Or we point it at yours
Send the address. You get the same nine checks, the same measurements, and the same plain list of what each fault is costing you — and you decide whether it is ever published. A reply comes within one business day.
Or do it yourself, now, for nothing: run the free nine-point audit on any address and keep the report.