Auditing a maritime website before a redesign: a 12-point checklist

Most maritime redesigns we’re asked to scope start with the same brief: “the site looks dated, we want a refresh”. Refresh is the wrong frame. The right question is “what is the current site failing to do, and would a redesign actually fix it?”. Sometimes the answer is yes; often the answer is “fix the homepage and the load time first”.

Twelve checks before you commit to a redesign:

1. Mobile load time on a 4G connection. Run a real-device test, not just Lighthouse. If the homepage takes more than four seconds, your competitor doesn’t need a better redesign than yours; they need to load.

2. The “fold” content on each top-level page. What’s visible without scrolling? If it’s a stock-photo banner and the words “delivering excellence”, you’re losing buyers in the first three seconds.

3. Service-page specificity. Pick your most important service page. Could a competitor swap their logo onto it and have it still be true? If yes, it’s too generic.

4. Case study depth. Do they have numbers, named clients (where permitted), narrative arcs and outcomes? Or are they capability decks with logos and bullet points?

5. Conversion paths. From the homepage, count clicks to “start a conversation” or “request a brochure”. More than two is friction.

6. Form length. Count fields on the contact form. Above six, abandonment becomes the default.

7. CRM integration. When a form fills, does it land as a structured CRM record with attribution, or does someone in marketing have to copy-paste from email?

8. Search Console errors. Pull the last 90 days. Anything with crawl issues, soft 404s or unindexed-but-discovered pages is leaking authority.

9. Internal linking density. Does each service page link to relevant case studies and pillar guides? Or is every page a dead end?

10. Schema implementation. View source on the homepage and a service page. Look for Organization, Service and BreadcrumbList. If they’re missing, AI search engines are guessing about your business.

11. Brand consistency. Compare your site, your LinkedIn, your Companies House profile and your Wikipedia entry (if you have one). Fact mismatches confuse both buyers and LLMs.

12. The “would a fleet director scroll past this” test. Read every page from the perspective of someone with twenty years in the sector and a low patience threshold for marketing fluff. Anything that wouldn’t survive that read is the first thing to rewrite.

If half of these fail on your current site, a redesign is justified. If only two or three fail, fix those before you commission anything bigger.