I spend my days fixing other people's websites, so I finally went through my own. Here's what I found, from a hidden phone number to a video six times bigger than it needed to be.
I've been building websites for small businesses for ten years, and for most of that time my own site sat there quietly being fine. It looked good. The work was on it. Nobody complained.
So this month I finally did for myself what I do for clients. I went through the whole thing, page by page, and looked at what was actually happening underneath. None of it showed on the surface, and there was more than I expected.
I'm writing it down because almost everything on this list is something I see on other people's sites too, whether a designer built them, the owner did, or an AI tool put them together over a weekend.
My personal number was in the footer and on the contact page, which I knew about and had stopped thinking about. It was also sitting in the hidden code that tells Google what my business is. That code isn't on the page, but anything that reads websites automatically can see it, and that includes the bots that collect phone numbers.
I got a Google Voice number for the business and swapped it in everywhere, the hidden spots included. It's a small change, but my cell number is mine again.
Worth checking on yours: if your personal number is anywhere on your site, assume it's already on a list somewhere. A separate business number is free and takes about ten minutes.
My homepage was loading 867 KB of stuff before you'd scrolled at all. More than half of that, 538 KB, was a spam checker on the contact form, the "I'm not a robot" kind.
I took it out and swapped in something quieter: a hidden field that people never see but spam bots tend to fill in. Then I sent myself a test message to make sure real messages still came through, and they did.
I also removed a tracking tool that had been installed years ago and wasn't doing anything anymore.
The homepage now loads 202 KB. Nearly all of that is the analytics I actually use.
Worth checking on yours: spam protection and tracking tools pile up. Someone adds one, nobody takes it out, and every visitor pays for it by waiting.
The Lone Cypress clip at the top of my homepage is eleven seconds long and it was almost 7 MB. That's heavier than every other thing on the page put together.
I re-saved it at a sensible size and it's now 1.7 MB. Side by side, I can't tell them apart. Phones don't load the video at all. They get a still image instead, which was already set up and is worth doing if you have a video at the top of your own site.
When I went to add my projects to LinkedIn, it told me it couldn't make a preview. The link worked fine, but LinkedIn had no image to show, so it wouldn't make the card.
The project pages had never been set up with a preview image. Each one now has its own, sized the way LinkedIn and everyone else expects. I also learned that LinkedIn doesn't reliably show the image format most modern sites use for speed, so the preview versions are plain JPGs.
Worth checking on yours: paste one of your own links into a LinkedIn post or a text message and see what shows up. If it's a blank box or the wrong picture, that's what everyone else sees too.
A few more that don't make a good story but still count:
None of this was visible. The site looked exactly the same before and after. That's the part I keep coming back to, because it's the part people skip.
Most sites get finished, launched, and then left alone. The design is done, so it feels done. But the stuff underneath, like who can see your phone number, how long someone waits, and what shows up when a client shares your link, keeps mattering for as long as the site is up.
If you have a site that looks fine and you haven't looked underneath it in a while, I'm happy to take a look. Send me the link and I'll tell you what I'd change.